What's been happeningIt’s been a pleasant week. Since the hot spell last week, it's been raining on and off, which has made the temperatures pretty pleasant. The gym workouts went well. We didn't manage to get our third workout in, so that's a bummer. My step count has reduced drastically as well - so I need to get them up. I'm trying to improve my conditioning - right now I mostly end up doing the scaled versions - but will switch to doing the RX ("as prescribed") versions - the goal being to…

Storm season starts 1st September [you have to start somewhere] but the first named storm "Austen" slugged in from the Atlantic last Th/Fr night NullSchoolWind windspeed snapshot 20:00 22Oct26 [L]. At Caislean Blob, it has been standard policy at least this year, maybe a bit longer, to heed MetÉireann's weather warnings and park the car in the next county, if the deluge is scheduled for overnight. I've been banned [you're too decrepit for that nonsense you blitherin' old ninny] from nipping out…

Awake befor my alarm.I reach over to the shelf next to my bed and touch it. The faint green-blue backlight activates and reveals a familar loaf shape at the foot of my bed.It is Sula, my cat.I sit up and lean forward, quietly humming the first few bars of Happy Birthday.Today is her birthday. She is 18.I begin to wrap my arms around her...Fuck!She is not there.It is a piece of laundry.Fooled by lack of sleep, and glasses.She is not even in my home. Because she died. Months ago.Today would have…

October 26, 2026 I’m going to do two Domesticated Valise posts with grey – this one, with soft accents, and another with brights… Does anybody remember this painting from here on The Vivienne Files? I used it SO LONG AGO that the images were all “landscape” rather than the “portrait” that the internet forces us to use… The original use of this painting started with a heroine who took a long train trip, returned to her office to find chaos, and took over some management responsibilities… And in…

Aurora Watch You might have noticed some rapid font changes on the site and that's because I've been trying to fix some things. One thing they never tell you about pixel fonts is how annoying they are! Pixel fonts have to scale in whole numbers to look crisp and not blurry (so you have to go from 1x to 2x in size) and for a while I was hacking it with a 16.5 px font but I got irritated at how often that looked blurry. So the answer has been to try some fonts out and get hacky with it a bit.…

Last time, we were left with a functioning but nongraphical SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional that needed its installation CD-ROM to be able to boot. Despite all my documentation, I didn’t find a list of Lilo errors that explained more than the “L” and the subsequent series of repeated “07”s that appeared the entirety of what the boot process delivered. But I could still boot using the intallation CD. That way, logged in as root, from my command line, I typed yast2 and found myself in an ncurses…

So your pal Mike sells comics for a living, or at least attempts to (this past Sunday was bit of a wash, ugh), and as part of that living, he…or, rather, I price a lot of back issues. Boy, I do love back issues. If I could just price and sell ’em all day, I would, but I have to do other things, like “break down the new comic shipments” and “help customers” — you know, distractions like that. But blessed are the days when I can just park at the counter with a big ol’ stack of old comics on one…

I'm using up the last three vintage photo prints that were part of a lot of about 20 images that turned out to be from several different Disneyland visits. Some were from 1965, but these are either from later in the 60s, or even into the 1970s. Mom is a real live wire, she loves to smile for the camera, waving like a maniac. I approve of her enthusiasm. Three members of the Bucket Hat Mafia are also aboard, don't make any sudden moves or you'll sleep with the fishes! The Storybook Land hostess…

Goldfinger (1964)

After reading the excellent Hell of Solitude recently, and then fitting in a cheeky reread of Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, I was browsing online for more work by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa when I stumbled across something very intriguing. However, rather than a book *by* the famed Japanese writer, it was a work *about* him, and constructed in a fairly unusual manner. Well, I suspect you know how that story ended (with a workout for my credit card), and today’s post has me telling you all…

It’s no secret that the Ace Combat series technically began with an arcade game, which then inspired the equally exciting PlayStation Air Combat that followed a few years later, its planes painted in eye-catching reds and lilacs. I always liked those early games, and even though the series successfully matured into more serious fare (while still maintaining that fun “Shooty Planes Are Cool” core), I often found myself yearning for the more straightforward days of old, where I’d make lots of…

One common advice to novice street photographers is to photograph the same area, near home, over and over again. That would allow them to know the place intimately and develop their skills in a familiar environment without relying on the extraordinary for interest. Of course, this leads to boredom with the place. That boredom is what happens when a place stops being scenery and becomes what it actually is: buildings, streets, cars, everyday stuff. Following my Deadpan photography deep dive, I…

They hurt me first. It’s important to remember that. I’ve only retaliated. The first thing they took was probably our democracy. The non-binding referendum, and the manipulation, and the illegal spending. All of it. The hidden analyses and forecasts. Running down the clock. Lying to the people, then pretending to care about the result, then ignoring all of us to plunge headlong towards the precipice, and then over it. Then they took my European citizenship, which I’ve had from birth — or even…

Every time the end of October comes round I realise that several attractions are about to close until next Spring, so if I want to visit I need to go now. This is great for me but bad for you as I end up blogging about somewhere you can no longer go. I've done this before with Camber Castle, the Chiltern Open Air Museum and 575 Wandsworth Road, so apologies but I'm doing it again. Harmondsworth Great Barn only opens on the second and fourth Sundays of the month from April to October, so I went…

Fremantle2026 October 26 (Monday), 3:00PM It's not the lumpers' caffeteria, nor the old police station, and I'm not really sure what name it has. But this little building on Victoria Quay has shed its temporary fencing and been stripped of its (presumably asbestos) verandah lining. It's Building 146 in the (now outdated?) master plan. ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at…

Remember re/thinking Twitter handles for your various projects? It’s 2026, I’m not doing all that for a shit platform. I will spend hours wrangling social I control though.

Last week two very critical vulnerabilities were identified in PHP. Problems Apart from the severity (9.2), there were several other problems with these vulnerabilities: Up tot 70% of the web runs on PHP: that's a lot. The patches were ~24 hours away: lots sites went down as a precaution But even then: only officially supported versions were to get patches (8.2 and up) So this left one big, huge, gigantic, massive problem: Lots and lots of webservers run older versions (8.1/8.0 and 7.x). So…

I thought I’d write a post as a sequel to the post where I talk about trying to stop using my phone so much. I’ve decided to make a drastic change: I’ve bought a 2022 iPhone SE because I can’t do bigger phones anymore. The iPhone 15 was my first big phone, after my previous SE 2022 was damaged in a botched repair and I was too sick to deal with that. I bought the iPhone 15 because I thought having a bigger screen would be nice. And now I’ve switched back. I’ve already written about why I’m…

Initial API definition and a simple property. This article is one of a series on finding properties for a budgeting kata. I expect you to have read the previous articles in the series. In this article we get started by adding a first sketch of data structures and an initial, simple property. The code is available on GitHub, in the commit 1f7aceb. Budget type # My intent with the entire exercise is to follow a variation of test-driven development (TDD) that uses QuickCheck properties rather than…

A trade journal ad promoting F.W. Murnau's 'Faust' (1926).I need to be more careful in introducing silent film programs. On Sunday, Oct. 25, prior to a screening of 'The Bat' (1926), I expounded on the many connections that the Batman franchise has with the silent film era.As an example, I cited actor Neil Hamilton, a popular silent-era leading man who many years later played Commissioner Gordon on the 1960s Batman TV series.I even used my patented laugh-getting line: "Seeing Neil Hamilton as a…

The final day of SPIEL has arrived. It is so weird to write this as I sit in the train heading out of Essen because it feels like five minutes ago that I arrived. Time just went by in a blur. There is always something to do or someone to meet, and if there isn’t, you’re usually glad for a break and catching some air … or sleep. I’m looking forward to get home and at the same time mourn the thing that I still could have experienced if I would have stayed one more night. I woke up early but due…

A song from the 1950s that you like or means something to you. Memories of my time at Hospital Radio Lennox are evoked by a small number of tracks. I heard so many songs for the first time there, exploring the record library, and it definitely was a formative part of my musical journey. I joined when I was 16, part of my community service to gain my Queen’s badge for the Boys Brigade, and met people who remain my best friends almost 40 years later. I can’t remember who played this on their…

Despite being a Mac person since 2005, I’ve got a fair amount of nostalgia for Windows XP. The original “Bliss” wallpaper was a photo shot by Charles O'Rear in Sonoma, but there was also a modified version with a lower hill, punchier colors, and a lens flare dubbed “Energy Bliss” which shipped with Media Center Edition. Now, more than 20 years later, I thought it deserved another update. “Vivid Bliss” uses punchier colors with a P3 color profile, some California hills in the background shot by…

Storm Austen temporarily pressed pause on my Wye pike campaign, shame, I was on a roll. But I couldn't resist a (back-up plan) few hours on The Pits. One lost, one tail-walking ugly-beauty landed. Nice.

Earlier this year, I published a notice of Chris Harte's newest magazine history and bibliography (read it here). This was on the UK magazine Men Only, which ran from 1936 to 1963. Just out is the associated anthology, A Men Only Magazine Anthology (Sports History Publishing, ISBN 9781898010241), containing over one hundred of the best writings from the magazine. Notable authors

The issue When a concern about a chief executive’s conduct reaches the board, the usual answer is development—coaching, mentoring, a program—which treats a question of character as a gap in skill. Why it persists A training need can be resourced, scheduled, and reported as closed; a judgement about character can only be made, and the directors who make it must own it. What to do Decide first whether the concern is about skill or conduct, and answer a conduct question as one: with particulars, a…

I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed almost nothing else.-- Edward Teller, eulogizing John von NeumannI listened to Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" in my car during the many commute hours Bay Area traffic afforded me. I thought I should share the Johnny phenomena here.I knew about von…

Defs a back loaded week for me - big Friday and weekend. Work was 2 days a week today which was a lil stinky, but we did drinks which was nice. Two new fits this week, both v different! I got a new dress from the same brand that made the other white floral dress I have!! Just wanted 2 have more like,, summer-y dresses that I could wear 2 work :3 It's v diff to what I usually wear but I fw it! My hair is still drying in that selfie </3 but you'll have 2 trust I look good LOL. The other fit was…

Wisemans Ferry is a town located 75 kilometres north-north-west of Sydney. Named after Solomon Wiseman, a former convict who received a land grant in the area. Wiseman established a ferry service on the Hawkesbury River in 1827 for the transport of produce and provisions to the convicts building the Great North Road; the ferry continues to operate today. The road to Wisemans Ferry we took was via Cattai/Maroota, which is surrounded by the Cattai National Park and Maroota Ridge State…

It’s on HBO Max now, the video says Netflix but people kept telling me it isn’t on there so I’m reposting to say that they just moved it to HBO Max since I posted it the first time. Go watch it there! Scavengers Reign! Jason Pargin review on Meta. He says it is one of the best sci-fi things he has seen. I have not seen it. Lots of ckips online, etc.