I miss using my iPad Mini 5, but ever since iOS 27 came out it’s been massively slower and I’ve mostly switched to my M1 iPad Pro (which also makes a few other things simpler, like travel, note taking, using external displays, etc.). I very dearly want to go back to the Mini since the Pro is too large as a permanent companion device, but the inflated pricing is not helping. and neither is my feeling that Apple has likely nerfed the hardware in ways that matter to me. As an example, there’s a…

Kobe Hummingbird ($35 for 50ml bottle) is a collaboration between Vanness Pen Shop and Nagasawa Kobe inks. The color was inspired by the Arkansas hummingbird plumage and came about when Lisa Vanness was speaking with the team at Nagasawa Kobe and discovered that hummingbirds do not exist in Japan. So to share the love of these tiny birds fueled by sugar with the world, this vibrant green ink was created. The color is a vivid green with moderate sheen. It will be noticed most often on Tomoe…

After planning a trip to London, I knew I had to get some new gear so I could be more prepared. I am still using a small Jansport bag, which I am sure was purchased on a trip in America in 2000! It's not big enough to store clothes for multiple days, and only one of the zippers works. So, I needed… A New Bag I started off by doing a quick search and reading some recent top ten lists. These summaries gave me some idea of sizes, options, functionality, and cost. I then asked for personal…

As I said when I reviewed Drops of God: Mariage volume 11, I’m enjoying this series more than the original because of its emphasis on food pairings and gourmet dishes. After one big contest storyline wrapped up, a new one began, this time involving finding wines to match with the Four Major Chinese Cuisines. The story has been going for a few books, but these two are the latest volumes. (Volume 16 is due out the first of December; this [...]

Why Not Books?, Ethel C. Taylor (1920), public domain image from Artvee For the past six months or so, I have found myself wanting to do something different with this blog, yet having only a very vague sense of what that means. I have been creating less in terms of both poetry and collage artwork […]

The one who gossips with you will always gossip about you. We have heard this countless times, and yet we never heed it. We are always eager to catch the latest gossip. More often than not, we befriend the very people who indulge in idle gossip. We never stop them. Nor do we stop ourselves. Because intuitively, we know the saying isn't an absolute truth. Your heart knows its claim doesn't hold in every case. But it isn't an outright lie either. That is what a good saying does. It distills…

The above-quoted passage is from The Inland Sea, Donald Richie’s 1971 acclaimed classic. Some parts of it have aged well. The cover photo of this post is a crop of the book’s original(?) cover photography by Yoichi Midorikawa. Buy it here (and forgive Powell’s for listing the author incorrectly as Midorikawa—it’s still a great bookseller).Edit: I adore the constraint of a single typed sheet—on your behalf it heckles, “okay buddy let’s wrap this up.”

Two stories, one struggle – on the Oxford riverbank, live-aboard boaters are caught in a struggle over mooring, access, responsibility and who gets to decide how shared space is used. In the #Fediverse grassroots communities face a related struggle over digital space, moderation, ownership and who gets to shape the networks we depend on. At first glance, these look like different problems. One is about boats, land and the river; the other is about servers, software and online communities. But…

While horror movies have had a remarkable run in the 20th century, I was being a scaredy cat who tried to avoid all of it. But I eventually realized I might be missing something. So many of my fellow cinephiles also love horror, and not just for cheap thrills. What did they see that I didn’t? Read my piece for Cinema Sugar where I lay out the five horror movies that brought me into the dark and showed me the light about a timeless genre.

Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere - IIIYou might not think that a band called Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere would have written one of the year’s most moving tunes about the bonds of friendship. But you’d be wrong! “Friendship Song,” the second track off of the latest APIE record, is a ramshackle country rock beauty, riding those “Just Like Heaven” chords into … well, somewhere just like heaven! The rest of III follows suit, filled with bathroom stall poetry, dirtbag philosophizing, western Mass…

The final week of October. Trying to make the most of it right now. Photos are of a couple of our more silly Halloween decorations.

On the blog this week, we’re discussing who my people are, and who they are not. Chime with your two cents here. And, oh, lookee! A new Bad Heir is on the Coming Soon page! I’ve slated An Heir of Intrigue for release in February. This will be book seven in the series, and features our new friend, Magnus Johnson, who lands himself in some pretty unfriendly territory when a Scottish title befalls him. More details here.

Most engineering leaders Pragmatic Engineer talked to agree there will be fewer builders and smaller teams. How does that change our understanding of a team and the roles that we've come to depend on? More importantly, how have feedback loops that were administered by frameworks […]

Most engineering leaders Pragmatic Engineer talked to agree there will be fewer builders and smaller teams. How does that change our understanding of a team and the roles that we've come to depend on? More importantly, how have feedback loops that were administered by frameworks […]

Before, if you wanted your system to listen to events in Linear and GitHub, you'd have to build webhook integrations for those two systems. Your service provides some URL that these external systems can send API calls to, in the very specific format for each platform, and you process that payload. Want to also support GitLab? You can re-use some of what you've built, but GitHub and GitLab webhook events aren't structured the same, so you'd have to build a new integration, probably on a separate…

Until last week, India had no Public Backbone Interfaces for the reticulum. I started one last week so we could have one in India. I really wanted one in Bangalore, but the Mumbai server was the cheapest. So I set up one in Mumbai. Of course, you can use the one outside India; that is how I started, but it would make sense to have one closer to you. It avoids packets going out and coming back. Setting it up and running as a system service wasn’t that difficult. There is enough information…

This week I'm working on making our doc site agent friendly. Most agents read pages through fetch tools that don't run JavaScript, so content that loads only when someone clicks is invisible to them, while content that's merely hidden with CSS still comes through. Long pages are another problem, because agents truncate them and then fill the gaps with guesses. This post covers which JS patterns can stay, why long pages need splitting, and how I set up a Markdown mirror with a Cloudflare worker.

Yesterday, I listened to Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Wall. The album came out in 1979. I was a high school senior and on my way to university the following year. For those unfamiliar with it, the album was conceived as a rock opera and is the story of an alienated young man who responds to the slings and arrows of his life by building a metaphorical wall around himself ("All in all it's just another brick in the wall"). At the time, I appreciated it as a work of art that showed me a person…

Wyrdcry has a competitor, and it’s a tough one: Black Death City by Sean Parsons. The fellow who made Warcry is making his own skirmish game, his own take on Mordheim. In what feels like a plot twist, it’s more complicated than I had expected, borrowing from Kill Team and some of the old school mechanics of Warhammer. I need to give the game a try, because Parsons is probably one of the best game designers working right now. It’s an exciting time for Mordheim fans. His most recent video is…

Wyrdcry 1.0 is out. The game is a mashup of Warcry and Mordheim, two of the greatest war games of all time. The game is available for free. Game play is almost identical to Warcry, so that is to say basically perfect. Deeper list building options and the factions you can play are what pull this towards Mordheim.

The security community recognized several years ago that Git hooks can represent an attack vector. Security-focused developers discourage downloading zip archives of Git repositories for this reason. A simple “git status” will kick off an executable script with the full power of a shell. In a world where unsupervised agents are humming away writing software, this is no longer something we can ignore. Copilot and Claude Code have recently had this class of exploit reported in their agent…

I try to use AI (Claude in my case) consciously. My usage varies a lot during the week: on some days I don't even open it, while on others I'm fully immersed in it, creating a repo with multiple agents and skills that collaborate like a team, or coding a full-fledged app. Unfortunately, willingly or not, this is what you have to do if you want to stay competitive in today's market. But I draw a line, multiple ones actually, when it comes to certain things: Things I use AI for Writing or…

Prompt #5 Source

Do you read Markdown on your Mac? Plans, notes, READMEs, the files your AI writes for you all day? Then why not make every one of them a pleasure to read? Mardo is the best Markdown viewer ever made. Select any Markdown file in the Finder, press Space, and Quick Look shows it beautifully rendered — tables, code, diagrams, math, and all. Then watch it come alive. Leave that preview open while Claude Code, Codex, or any other app rewrites the file, and every change arrives in real time, right…

connecting with people that share my values is rewarding. a win-win situation spending time with people that share ancestors, hobbies or location are less so h/t jake

On our last full day with the van, we drove from El Capitán State Beach Campground to Golden Shore RV Resort in Long Beach; a place we had previously stayed in our class A motorhome; a little different in a van.An interactive map of our route:US-101 South:We stopped at Santa Claus Beach for lunch; again a non-planned stop that I found en route, but an excellent spot:A random lunch of some remaining food:Pacific Surfliner train:Back on US-101 South:Another El Camino Real bell marker:Long…

We're hearing some rumblings that Star Trek may not live up to fan expectations. Should Wizards be concerned about it's cash cow? The post Will Star Trek Continue Magic’s Epic Run of Success? appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

An interesting series of early science fiction works has appeared from MIT Press: The Radium Age. The series covers science fiction that appeared between 1900 and 1935, before the Golden Age of science fiction. The series is edited by Joshua Glenn, who is not a science-fiction expert but instead is a “semiotics analyst,” semiotics being […]

I have been spending a lot of time lately looking back at the origins of my witches, both in Advanced Witches & Warlocks and in my Jackson, Illinois setting. Last time, I discussed why witches have been such an important part of my gaming and writing for nearly forty years. My fascination began with books on mythology, folklore, magic, and the supernatural, eventually finding its way into my games and the characters I created.But no one creates these things in a vacuum.When I look back at the…