"I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" Peter O’Toole plays an Errol Flynn-like washed up drunk actor, tasked with appearing live on a comedy sketch show. A junior writer on the show (Mark Linn-Baker) has the job of trying to stop him running away. There’s an odd mix here of a sharp wise-cracking screwball style comedy, crossed with a cosy shapeless comedy-drama — and I like it! Peter O’Toole plays the charming but sad-behind-the-eyes part well, and everyone around him sort of struggles to keep…

(Lance and Bill did a vidcast about the OpenAI Document Drop. See here. My spellcheck thinks that vidcast and OpenAI are not words.) The Metric TSP problem is TSP where, for all vertices \(x,y,z\), \(w(x,z) \le w(x,y) + w(y,z) \).In 1976 Christofides and Serdyukov (independently of each other) showed that there is a poly time algorithm for a 1.5-approx to Metric TSP.Some people thought the 1.5 could be improved.Some people thought that 1.5 is optimal. 1.5 is a natural number. Hmm, that's not…

Spotted on today's bike ride.

I say again: the summer is not actually the best time to drive a convertible. I’ve been treated to a full week of glorious 50+ degree weather, and I’ve been top down for most of it. I think 50 degrees is the bellwether; if it’s 50 or above, and it’s not raining, the top goes down. It’s spritzes and cheese here at home as the chicken thighs roast in the oven. I’m lucky to be sitting here, feeling pretty blissed out, assembling a list of things that delight me, and sharing them with you. iPhone…

I read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I had high hopes after reading Snow Crash and Seveneves. Cryptonomicon certainly had some interesting parts and great scenes, but it also had some seriously underdeveloped characters and clichés which annoyed me.However, it had an appendix about a card-based the encryption scheme which was used as a plot device, and is actually a real encryption scheme called Solitare.The algorithm is surprisingly easy to do with a deck of cards especially after some…

I upgraded my blog from zine 0.11.0 to 0.14.0. While I was testing, I found several links from my blog are now broken because the target website has gone away :(A site I used to use for hosting video: (tube.spdns.org)A tutorial site for longboarding tricks (ampskate.com)Link rot is real.

I complain about spam texts and consider why I’m so hesitant to just reply STOP to unsubscribe.

For years and years, developers have had to come up with all sorts of creative workarounds to style <select> dropdown menus. I covered this a good while ago in Form styling limitations are an accessibility issue, and I can’t tell you how excited I was when Safari 27 included ‘Customisable Select’, following Chrome’s lead from early last year. A false start Some years ago, there was a proposal for a new <selectmenu> HTML element. That would have meant replacing existing <select>s to take…

A rather uneventful week. Currently on the coach back from Anfield and I get travel sick easily so keeping these notes brief. I had Thursday and Friday off work only for plans to change at the very last minute. Rather than going to back to work on Friday, I chose to have a long weekend instead. Tried to watch some of the NBA games this week but found it harder than it should have been. Photographers sync their cameras to strobe lights in the arena and they illuminate the court when the…

The latest build of Uppercase is now live. This version includes a few obvious updates – as well as few under-the-hood changes.MusicThe most obvious change is music. The main menu had a song – one that I wrote. It wasn't amazing, but it was pleasant. Critically, it set the puzzle-solving tone!This new build comes with a brand new theme song composed by my friends Brothers Nylon. And I have to say: they absolutely nailed the tone of the game!There's now a dedicated music player in the game. It…

Night cap: When a family member creates an Old Fashioned for you sometime after midnight and it really hits the spot*.Method etc.Take the orange peel and squeeze it with your fingers. Rub the peel around the insides of a whisky tumbler, then place into the glass. Add the cherry, sugar syrup and bitters, along with three ice cubes.Add half of the scotch or bourbon and stir for about ten seconds. Add more ice and the remaining scotch or bourbon and stir again for 10-15 seconds.To serve, garnish…

I've been happy with my Kobo Aura ebook reader since I bought it 8 years ago. It's light, has a crystal clear e-ink display, a decent back light, and the battery still lasts quite a long a while. I've read many books on it, most of which I have bought through the Kobo store. The DRM free service they provide is very convenient and give me access to a wide selection of books for a reasonable price.When I go travelling I never take the Kobo Aura with me as it's a bit of an awkward size. It's…

In August, I wrote about replacing security/pam-ssh-agent-auth with security/pam_ssh_agent. The old module is abandoned and deprecated. The new one, pam-ssh-agent, was a drop-in replacement in /usr/local/etc/pam.d/sudo: auth sufficient /usr/local/lib/pam_ssh_agent.so file=~/.ssh/authorized_keys I saw no problems with it, except when this one case. The symptom With an ssh-rsa key, sudo fell through to the next PAM entry, and this showed up in the logs: pam_ssh_agent(sudo:auth): authorized keys…

In this issue: How employment is changing at Anthropic (anthropic.com) How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two (lennysnewsletter.com) Deciphering Glyph :: Programming Isn’t Special (blog.glyph.im) Claude Duet | Your personal AI assistant (claude.com) Announcing AWS Lambda Web Functions (aws.amazon.com) Pele · Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG (pele.run) The people holding up the internet | Data Drop (sheets.works) Plus 16 more links, 14 journal posts, a photo, and a…

The Return Of The Pink Panther (1975)

In retrospect, my decision earlier this year to wear a watch again seems fitting, given my growing preoccupation with time. I’m not the first person to wrestle with this intangible yet unavoidable aspect of life, especially in middle age. But, much like the watch strap against my wrist, the unexpected richness of this year has left its mark. The ancient Greeks had two ways of thinking about time. Chronos was time as measured: years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Kairos was a…

Twenty-three years after writing The Time Traveler’s Wife, American author Audrey Niffenegger, has published a sequel, Life Out of Order. The focus of the follow up moves to Alba, the daughter of Henry DeTamble, who had a rare genetic disorder that caused him to travel through time, often with little warning. In Life Out of Order, Alba has inherited her father’s disorder, and also finds herself moving back and forth through time. You’d almost have needed to be able to travel through time when…

Amazon over the past couple of days has been making me click to confirm I am not a robot. As if that would do anything. I guess because I use an uncommon operating system and I open links in new tabs rather than having to click back and losing my spot Not ironically their crawler hits my website to train their AI I am sure. I am even logged into my account. No doubt it’s just away to punish me for using ad blockers and reducing their ability to track me all over the web. No company should be…

If you work in software (as a designer, developer, PM, or any adjacent role), you’re probably aware of just how much AI has changed the way code is created. And if you’re an engineer, you’re definitely feeling the downstream impacts of AI’s speed. Way, way more code is being written. But the way we review code hasn’t changed that much. But if you’re not familiar, code review is a step in the software development process where developers look at code before it gets shipped. It’s been a…

It’s been an intense few weeks and, although I’ve got a lot on my plate, I decided I needed a day to properly disconnect, which led to a drive out to Emeryville to visit The Compound Gallery and my good pal Tim’s show, The Weight of a Blessing which was closing today. I ran into Tim earlier this week while at CCA to see Martin Venezky speak, so this was the perfect was to connect those particular creative dots. As a former student of Martin, Tim’s latest collection clearly inherits…

The Great British Baking Show series 17/collection 14 episode 5's Dessert Week.

The previous two posts have been about polar triangles. The first used a polar triangle to derive a theorem, and the second showed how to compute polars using linear algebra. But what exactly is a polar triangle and why is it called that? Poles and polars on a sphere Let’s start with a sphere S and a great circle G. Then G is the intersection of S with a plane through the center of S. The circle G has two poles, two points on opposite sides of S that are as far as possible (i.e. π/2 radians)…

Last edited 2 minutes ago. this one’s gonna be the briefest. votes have been cast, and hopes have been dangerously lifted. im here now at my auntie’s, with my cousins and my cousins’ kids, writing on my phone and thinking that maybe there’s hope. maybe we can turn the tides and rid ourselves of the bolsonaro threat for another 4 years. the senate has been lost, so we better have this. im very lucky to have a non-fascist family. having hope is very scary. You can reply via email or leave a…

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the future of Kingshill House and whether Stroud District council will continue the funding. So today was an opportunity to throw open the doors to everyone and showcase what activities take place there. I’ve been there many times over the last few years, but there’s always new things to see and learn. They had a very comprehensive history section going through all the ownership and uses over the years. We also had a tour of the cottage out the back…

It’s almost twenty-five years since the iPod arrived. To mark the launch of Apple’s iconic digital music player in November 2001, music lovers can relive the early days of the iPod music listening experience on the Apple Music 404 page. 404 page? Read all about them here.

First storms of winter blew across the country the past couple of days (coinciding appropriately enough with the end British Summer Time). No dramas to report, just a spindly Silver Birch at the music school that blew over and snagged another tree. It was slender enough that I cut it with a bow saw and dragged the sections deeper into the trees to rot.

As the youngest of four brothers, I was exposed to several TV movies that are only vague memories in my brain. One in particular was played in the early 1970s and had a scene set in a conference room with a table and a group of people sitting in chairs concentrating on a pencil poked through a sheet of paper. The group is trying to make the sheet of paper rotate around the pencil and eventually it starts to spin. Dennis S.

Women of Music 39Alice Ann - No Cheaters Fool.mp3Angela Christie -It's All Up To You.mp3Cammy Carol - Pin Up Boy.mp3cover 39.jpgDee Dee Warwick - You're No Good.mp3Donna Hightower - Hands Off.mp3Fran Harris - He's My Texas Baby.mp3Julie London - Yummy Yummy Yummy.mp3Pat Brown - The Good Got To Suffer For The Bad.mp3Rochelle Lara - Steady.mp3Sue Brubaker - The Dead Came Back.mp3Sylvia Jean - No No (Twist).mp3Theresa Lindsey - Daddy - O.mp3

In a world of untrustworthy news sources, I made another one. HYPEWIRE posts AI-related tech news bullshit to Bluesky four times a day.

Whenever a new version of .NET arrives, I want to know what has changed in authentication and authorization. As a consultant and trainer working with ASP.NET Core, I need to know what those changes mean for the applications I build and the workshops I teach. I also wanted to check the smaller updates, since they can include more than bug fixes. I compared: .NET 10.0.1 to 10.0.13: the changes in the .NET 10 servicing updates. .NET 11 RC2: the additional changes in the next major version. A fix…