Just a shout out that Ctrl+U and Ctrl+K works on muse and it was a delightful surprise. This is built by people who care and that’s worth something.

This was a great recommendation from a friend. Some fantastic 70s fusion jazz here, with touches of disco - really enjoying that string section. (This is a full playlist, so let it play through to the rest of the songs!)

“The Haunted Omnibus” is a title that suggests some form of public transport filled with spooks, but all the spectres here are lodged in the pages of a story collection from 1937, edited by Alexander Laing and later reprinted in a truncated edition as Great Ghost Stories of the World. Both books were collections for American readers, with at least half the stories in The Haunted Omnibus originating in Europe. Many of the selections feature no ghosts at all; “weird tales” would be a better…

Dreaming Big Let me rein this in. I think all these products, services, hardware, software… it’s all starting to feel very, very unnecessary. It seems to me that companies like Apple are not content with their total market saturation, so they have to double-down on that. It’s not enough to just have a phone or a computer, with new ones every few years. You need Apple Watches and iPads and HomePods too. Enshittification comes for us all.

A water tower in the cloudy sky over Josephine, Texas. The post Just a Little Rust… appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

It seems like we're in a golden age of software documentaries. As a card-carrying computer history nerd I'm having the time of my life, so I figured I'd share some of my favorites. If you're into programming languages, open-source software, or really computers in general, pull up a chair (and a cushion for your aching coccyx) and check these out. The Story of Python and how it took over the worldLink: YouTube I think this is the one that got me started on my docu-binge. Python is one of the…

Let me get this out of the way: I am a bad person and I feel bad. I thought I was done with this crap. But last week was bad in computer security. PHP got rooted–no, no, you can’t root a computer language, except when every web site based on PHP is vulnerable to an attack, PHP got rooted. On the same day, digital security company eMudhra was found to have deployed a poor private key for signing X.509 certificates. Only a digital security company with very special skills would use a private key…

There are two primary kinds of human endeavor: drawing boxes and shading them in. The first defines the boundaries of behavior, culture, and discussion; it draws the boxes. The latter implements those definitions and works within those boundaries. In other words, it shades them in. I think these two definitions can help us grapple with a lot of the current debate around the role of humans and A.I. going forward. To see how, let's first explore what I mean by shading in via some historical…

Nagoya’s Blurred City Lights are clearly continuing the run-up to their third record – you don’t get new band photos just for fun – but their second new single of the years isn’t spilling tea just yet. 「‪Voyage」follows 「月光」, which came out back in April, and continues to showcase a bigger-sounding band than debuted on […] The post Blurred City Lights -「‪Voyage」 appeared first on Space Echo.

I’m very happy to say that I am now contributing a regular column to Opening Times, the bi-monthly magazine produced by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA branch. For my first column, appearing in the September/October issue, I considered an in-depth discussion of the minutiae of the CAMRA beer-scoring system, but decided in the end to look at another recent concern of this blog: nostalgic evocations of the past in pubs and beer. Now read on… Here’s a pub scene, from a novel published in 1958…

This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we’ll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how confusing everything felt at the time. This is a personal view from the trenches. 1. If you’re a normal person, you may feel that AI has been good at math for a long time.1 But for “real” math, this is roughly what it felt like: When Feeling 2024 LLMs are toys Summer 2025 LLMs are…

I have been using samplers a lot the last few years. Without fail, there is some simple thing that seems to be basic functionality that each sampler absolutely will not do. I’m going to refrain from commenting further on that, and just tell you the thing I’m here to tell you: How to infinitely loop a sample in one-shot mode on the MPC Live 3, and probably on all MPC devices running the MPC 3.x OS I pulled my hair out over this one for quite some time, so I thought I’d share. To head off all the…

I went to see NAZA last week. In case you haven’t heard yet, NAZA is a documentary on the Israeli machinery of mass killing in Gaza. It draws a picture of this machinery by interviewing 24 Israeli who work(ed) for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The interviewees describe how the machinery of killing Palestinians in Gaza works and relies on AI. Israel is able to listen to the phone conversations and read phone messages of people living in Gaza. It uses that information to guess who works for…

T. Kingfisher, the horror pen name of Ursula Vernon, is inspired by Lovecraft and is a very decent writer. She has some brilliant ideas that sometimes land and sometimes do not. This one landed perfectly, alright! Imagine a combination of Stranger Things and The Call, via whatever story about a recent divorcee and her gay male friend sharing adventures you've been subjected to recently, and you get The Hollow Places. It's "unexplainable spaces" horror, which I love, from House of Leaves to…

When Twitter started going downhill, which was before Musk took over, and people started looking for alternatives I first looked at Mastodon as a replacement. It was federated (no central server or owner) and had a lot of open source options for using the tool. The issue it faced and still faces is that it is federated, meaning there are different people in different communities and getting all of those posts in a single location is a lot of work; And engaging and being engaged in those…

by George Pritchard When I started covering anthology series this year, I was excited to see what the New Wave held for me, and Orbit 8 seemed highly promising. But two more exhausting collections followed: first the non-edited nightmare of Universe 1 and then the feverish highs and lows of Quark/4. So, by the time … Continue reading [October 26, 1971] The Infinity Box (Orbit 9) → The post [October 26, 1971] The Infinity Box (<i>Orbit 9</i>) appeared first on Galactic Journey.

When I'm really focused on a project I'm invested in, I still have no problem hammering out hours and hours of focused work. One of the core truths about my life is that I feel better when I have something engaging to work on and think about. I love making progress. I love improving things. It's the best.

An old friend is getting married. He and his fiancée chose to do a small destination wedding in Italy. They’re both grown adults, no kids, and this will be their first marriage. Why not do it up big? Why not just have the parents and their very best friends out to celebrate? Family got wind of this plan and the small wedding became a bigger wedding. We decided this was a very good excuse to repeat our first trip to Italy. Just in time for la Biennale. After dropping off the poodle with the…

A Moment in Time A plane rumbles aboveThe dog barks at the sky aboveThe clock ticks, tick-tok The Magical Mundane Twinkling lights surroundDelighting and entrancing.Some see only bugs. Playing on Earth A clockwork of planets to choose,I turn the wheel, tuning time and place.I fall to earth, to play once more. What Lies Beneath? The full moon shines above,Obscured by clouds, like words camouflaged,Meaning hidden but not unknown. Breeze of Venus The evening star glows.A wind without movement…

📷 282/365 - Unaware in their new VR reality.

Olafur Eliasson spread in The We Global Times, 10th Anniversary Edition, Oct. 24, 2026, via museumfortheunitednations.com For its 10th anniversary the Museum for the United Nations invited some people to share headlines they would like to see in 2036, and Olafur Eliasson said, “Science has proven that being in love is good for the climate,” next to this absolutely inscrutable photo of a wonky sculpture. Which is how the best Olafur sculptures should be, of course. As the production and…

I’ve completed development work on OAuth support in pimsync. The implementation has been tested primary with NextCloud (both its built-in OAuth provider and the OIDC plugin), but should be usable with any CalDAV/CardDAV server using OAuth for authentication. It should also work with Google’s flavour of CalDAV, although this has yet to be tested. At this point, mostly the documentation is missing — the reference-level documentation is there, but a friendlier “how to” guide covering all the…

yesterday was the second round of the Brazilian presidential elections, and in a historic moment, ★ Lula was re-elected ★. this was the first time the first-round runner-up was elected in the second round. and it took SO F* MUCH to get here. for the last three weeks, Brazilians all around the globe fought, protested, and called out lies and fake news, meta (aka facebook) and trump were intervening, some of our people were even killed by other citizens for their political ideology. which is…

It’s been interesting to watch coverage of the new iPhone Duo. Regardless of how you feel about the device it is certainly something different and I dare say exciting to talk about. I haven’t seen or fondled the device in person as of yet. I’m planning a trip to a local Apple Store at some point early this week to see and touch it for myself. I’m sure my reactions will be similar to most. It’s a cool new piece of tech that has some first generation issues. Regardless of how that visit pans out,…

#coffeeneuring2026 No. 4; 6.6km round-trip Down in the centro, there are two bars of great note, and everyone has a strong preference for one or the other. No clear winner. Me, I prefer Sant Eustachio. Maybe it’s because I was introduced to it by my lost Italian friend, who would take dessert here after a late dinner downtown, a large espresso with a marron glacé, the sweet and the bitter offsetting one another perfectly provided, of course, that you remember to order your coffee amaro,…

This past weekend, my daughter asked me how I choose who to vote for in an election so I told her my three rules: Do not vote for someone who wants to take someone else’s vote away. Vote for those who aim to provide people with care and kindness. Vote for someone who talks about a bright future. I wish more people followed these rules.

Taleb is back with another round of “AI cope:” Two weeks ago I wrote that predictions of widespread AI job loss often amount to a coping mechanism. His tweets can be interpreted in two ways: as what he thinks will happen, but also as what he wants to happen. A lot of people want to see an AI crisis, a bubble, or the obsolescence of white-collar jobs (including math and high-status academic jobs) in order to reconcile themselves to their own mediocrity. The cognitive dissonance is especially…

the other day i tried a guided meditation vel tarot reading from jenna matlin's "tarot book of the dead". i only have the sample of the book but the experience was positively surprising, it's making me want to read more. sidebar: the book does suffer from a pet-peeve of mine, where an author jumps on a theory they're excited about without even mentioning the (i thought?) established, mainstream understanding first, and just presenting Their Thing as the Obvious Real Thing. ok, pop culture…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been taking the opportunity I have right now to software-test my nervous system. In particular, I’ve been examining the ways to pull myself back toward focus; whether due to the ADHD or the overstimulation, I need effective tools to start getting my brain back and nervous system back to where I want it to be, rather than where it ends up on its own. One of the more effective tools is the playlist. This, in itself, is not a new realization. It’s a tried and true…

The third of the three Ramen Bae new ramen offerings. This, of course, is a take on the popular variants in the ultra spicy space from South Korea. Curious how it will stack up – let’s find out. Ramen Bae Korean Spicy Artificial Chicken Flavor Protein Ramen Stir Fry – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, boil noodle for 6~7 minutes. Drain. Add in sachet contents. Finally, stir and enjoy! A six pack box . Detail of…