Time now to shape the neck!Also, I have a brief chat about the tools needed for this process. After running through the shaping process, I start the clean-up in preparation for setting-up the mandolin, “in the white.” Cheers Gary
Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “One Creature Devouring Another” by Alicia Lim. Alicia is an artist, writer, and labor organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in KHÔRA. She is currently obsessed with horseshoe crabs and bog bodies, and has recently become completely enamored with ceramics. You can find her artwork at alicialim.com. Boar With Wolf by Alicia LimI. Night falls, spreads. A woman with dark…
TALKIN SHIT (Fun sidenote, I learned that this little fucker is called the "Gray Catbird" and I love it so much) I-guess-this-is-just-gonna-be-a-format-I-use-from-now-on photography
Scans from a 1776 atlas of the Americas, published in London as the American revolution was getting under way, have been posted by JSTOR. The story from JSTOR Daily: In the summer of 1775, shortly… More
WebKit, to quote its website, “is the web browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store, and many other apps on macOS, iOS, and Linux.” Obviously, Safari uses WebKit to display web pages, but did you know that Mail app uses WebKit to display email messages? This is true not just for HTML emails but also for plain text format emails. There are a couple of ways to reveal the presence of WebKit in Mail, both of which may be bugs. If you disable “Auto-play animated images” in the Accessibility…
Nolan Royalty (@eieio.games), writing without the assistance of generative AI, in a post entitled "Legibility of Effort": What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work. First of all I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate that this was a blog post and not a tweet. The dense hypertextual writing in itself suggests some greater degree of effort. But as Nolan points out, even…
From The Flamborough Review, January 5, 1983, by E.B. Kennedy:“This little business developed out of difficulties we encountered in trying to find the most suitable computer for our use at home,” explained Norm Rukavina of Carlisle, in a recent interview about “Cellar Door Software” and its, “Have Computer, Will Travel” service.‘My son Peter and I had to do so much homework and digging out of information,” he continued, “that we thought we might be able, by sharing what we had learned, to save…
Read the full post at - Redwood Grove On my visit to Redwood National Park, I learned that Redwoods generally grow in a grove around a “mother tree” – so you’ll often get this cluster of tall trees around a mega tall tree…or a giant shaded circle where the “mother” used to stand. The effect is reminiscent of a real life Roman Sacred Grove. And I learned that they are actually called fairy rings. They are fascinating and absolutely magically real.
Hello, once again, and welcome to my fediverse hi-jinx! This is going to be somewhat of a shorter post, mostly because I need to make sure the couple or handful of people on my Mastodon instance at null.mkultra.social see this, but my Mastodon instance is “moving” to cmplxdecay.space! Why have I done this? Because I like to be annoying? No! Actually … I have quite a handful of servers currently. One that’s running my OpenSim grid, another that’s basically handling my bot-net, the server that…
Roaring AC mono block in the room but having to attend video conferences with talking? #EasyEffects makes short work of background noise. Just run that neat little app, it’ll plug in right into your #PipeWire (default on most modern Linux PCs) and add the noise suppressor to the input device. To actually “listen” to the effect enable the monitor on the button on the bottom right. Tune it until no noise is picked up any more and test if talking still makes it to your headphones. And that’s it.…
This post could also be called "the curse of 'recreational' paths." Basically, we had some bad rains and flooding in Davenport recently, and so when I tried to bike home from work I encountered this: And this was just the one that I bothered to dismount, photograph, and continue. Basically the whole Duck Creek Trail was like this, from pools of water across the entire trail to every underpass choked with mud.And unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts about that.1. Bike (and Pedestrian)…
From the Desktop apps section of the Deno documentation: deno desktop turns a Deno project (anything from a single TypeScript file to a Next.js app) into a self-contained desktop application. The output is a redistributable binary that bundles your code, the Deno runtime, and a web rendering engine into one bundle per platform. I'm happy to see another attempt at solving the biggest issues with Electron apps (other notable attempts being Tauri, Electrobun, and Neutralinojs).According to the…
My first memories of World Cup football are Mexico ’86. After Jock Stein died at the end of the qualifying match against Wales the previous year, some bloke called Alex Ferguson took over as manager. Not sure what happened to him after that though. Scotland, as usual, didn’t make it out of the group stage back then, in fact the closest we’ve managed was in 1974, the year after I was born, where we lost out on goal difference by one goal. We were unbeaten in the group stage though, one win, two…
Guest Post by: David Tonaszuck A reflection on the Gospel of Matthew 10:26-33 Dear Friends in Christ, Imagine a man named Jose, standing at a crossroads in his life. After years of hard work, Jose suddenly loses his job. He’s anxious about his future, not knowing how he’ll provide for his family. Friends and colleagues … Continue reading Choosing Christ Over Treasure: Walking the Way, the Truth, and the Life The post Choosing Christ Over Treasure: Walking the Way, the Truth, and the Life first…
My phone will ring some time in the next hour. It will be my Dad. He will be having a problem with his television. He will probably be pretty cross about it. He won't ask me to fix the problem. He will just blurt out "It's not doing anything." It's the same way a pre-schooler announces "I'm thirsty" instead of asking for a drink. The calls started shortly after he and my stepmother moved into an assisted living facility last fall. My wife (AKA Wonder Woman) found a remote system designed…
Sharing my favorite images from my archives. Source
I’m taking a break from blog posts for a week or so. See you in July!
Would you like to know what it might feel like to be very rich, to be able to do whatever money allows you do? Perhaps the best way I know is to visit Sotheby’s in New Bond Street, London. Sotheby’s is a broker for art, jewellery, fashion items, books, collectibles, and watches. (On my way to Sotheby’s this morning I read an astonishing article on the vast scale of money laundering–perhaps 5% of the global economy—and learnt that expensive watches are important in money laundering.) Founded in…
Abraham Grace Merritt, also known by his byline A. Merritt, was a new name to me when I was reading through Appendix N for the first time many, many years ago. Not a surprise, really. He was a contemporary of Howard and Lovecraft, publishing in the same magazines, but he was older (20 and 10 years or so respectively) than both. He was also more successful in terms of publishing and earnings. However, he lacked what made Howard and Lovecraft household names: strong, recognizable characters. In…
I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework computers. It fits in any available Framework Expansion slot—even on the Framework Desktop. But Expansion Cards use USB-C for their connection to the mainboard—and therein lies…
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions. sylvie’s Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good is an interesting little browser game where the point is figuring out how to play, then what to do. It’s really short! You can probably finish it in five minutes. The description calls it a manifesto, and I can see that, and also agree with it. (And it’s an entry in Manifestø Jam 2026 too.) My belief about game worth is…
Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," famously said, "The jobs that are going to survive AI for a long time are jobs where you have to be very adaptable and physically skilled, and plumbing is that kind of job."People who write for a living, especially those who are creative writers, like novelists and screenwriters, are, rightfully, concerned that these new tools will take their jobs. And they aren't the only ones. The jobs of anyone who works with their mind is…
John Stossel's report on the latest attempt by central planners to "fix" contract work contains the following incredible passage:The Democratic Socialists said they had a solution. Seattle's city council imposed a $26 delivery driver minimum wage.What could go wrong?Two years later, we know the answer: Gig workers make no more money, but prices went up.Apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats added a $5 fee for consumers "to help cover the costs of these ... regulations."Now Seattle residents complain…
There has to be something said about the need and the ability to go absolutely crazy.Love this idea.There has to be something said about the freedom to lose oneself and to lose your mind and go safely insane.If there is such a thing.Even if this is not safe, then . . .Oh well. So be it.There has to be a way.is there?I don’t know I only know that there is a purpose. I know that no matter how old we are, there has to be a part of us that yearns for more and to be younger and stronger than the…
I must really be in the mood to bake this week because I am back with another recipe that I decided to give a whirl! Today we have some Blueberry Cornbread Cookies with honey butter buttercream and blueberry compote from Eat at Maude’s, who I stumbled upon during a nightly Instagram reels binge. View this post on Instagram I wasted no time making these. I saw them and knew I had to have them immediately, but I was lacking blueberries and cornmeal. Funny enough, I had cornmeal but it was…
Drew Taylor / The Wrap: “Conan the Barbarian” is coming to Prime Video via a new animated series from animation legend Genndy Tartakovsky and Cartoon Network Studios. Tartakovsky first pitched an animated version of the character, created by Robert E. Howard in 1932, in 2008. Various networks and streamers were interested in the project, but now it has a firm home with Prime Video. It just entered development, so it will be a while before we see anything from the series. In a pre-taped video…
We're sharing a car while the other is in the shop. An unexpected benefit is that sometimes I'll drive Casey to work and experience the city in the morning.Currently Listening: Masakatsu Takagi “Marginalia #48”Reply via email
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John: If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to…
Absolute Hawkman / Carter Hall in Absolute Superman No. 20 (August 2026) SPOILER ALERT! As a Hawkman fan, it has been very difficult to like what DC Comics is doing to the character in their Absolute Superman series. Hawkman first appeared in Absolute Evil No. 1 last year, and there is absolutely nothing to like about this character as a hero or a person. He is a murderer and a traitor, and he has become the muscle for the villains of this universe's Earth. So when this issue kicked off the way…
