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…

Well, the ghost got her out. She lost the crown in the process and reached after it as it fell. What was it worth to her out there, and what was she still planning to do with it? I don't know yet. I do know what it's like to have a door at your back and keep shooting at the window, and that's what today's entry will be about.

It’s easy to see how VisonQuest could be irritating for some with its clever dialogue and sudden tone shifts but these are advantages as far as I’m concerned. The dialogue for example is witty even in what seem like throwaway comments. At times, it has the rhythm of a sitcom while still being quite serious when it needs to be. Visually it plays with TV imagery in a similar way to WandaVision. Its an appealing mix if you’re willing to go with it and these two episodes double down on those…

You're a rent seeker. It's an economist insult. It's devastating. You're devastated right now. Michael from The Good Place (paraphrased) Imagine, for a second, that AI really does become too cheap to meter. What happens next? I've heard hype that says there'll be a productivity boom to rival the internet, electricity, and spinning loom. That ideas and skill and taste will become the new currency, that 5 people can do the work of 500. Maybe. I think this is directionally correct but a bit…

Arrived in Chestertown this morning, a cold, crisp and clear morning without wind. I motored from Southeast Creek, arriving in time for a pastry and iced tea at Evergrain Bakery. These photos are from yesterday, an eight-hour sail - the first half against wind and tide - up the narrow Chester River. It was an enjoyable day, tacking under deep blue skies. The afternoon was playing the light breezes that came and went, and I had no complaints about the flood tide that helped along the way. People…

The sky was beautiful yesterday.I’m not sure if you saw this or notMaybe you did.Or did you? The clouds were like strips of long feathers. I swear. . .The clouds were like strands of long peacock feathers all long and stretched and perfectly white.I had to notice this. Sometimes the world lets you know that things are tough but still the sky is here and so is the sun, so are the clouds, and so are the birds who hover in the sky. I never had the chance to go to college. Well, not really.I never…

I was just reminded that exactly 100 years ago today, Enrico Fermi wrote this famous letter to Paul Dirac: That’s why we call them Fermi-Dirac Statistics! P.S. It seems that Enrico Fermi wasn’t too handy with a typewriter.

I have a Name that Trauma for you. It’s not a movie, it’s a computer game, and I don’t remember much about it other than it was set in a school and had zombies. I think the graphics were pretty cartoony and it was definitely kid friendly. This was in the mid '90s, and it was a computer game for Mac. Does anyone remember this?

Corpus Parisinum 479 = Philo fragment 11.4 Harris (tr. Denis Searby): To distribute equal shares to unequal sharers belongs to the greatest of injustices. Τὸ νέµειν ἴσα τοῖς ἀνίσοις τῆς µεγίστης ἐστὶν ἀδικίας.

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Speaking of fireside stories, this is a classic 1983 post called “The story of Mel, a real programmer”: […] I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better,…

I was watching Gergely Orosz the other day for some reason, and he was going on about the impact of AI on the industry (what I like to call the Cambrian Slop Explosion). He mentioned that one of the major changes–and one of the personally taxing effects of using AI–was constant context switching and how fatiguing it was. And I completely agree. Nearly two months after returning from vacation and after a particularly nasty overlap of work and personal projects, the thing I missed the most was…

Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So many of the messenger apps on my phone are other people laying claim to my time and attention. It reminds me of an interaction I had with my Dad years ago. This was back when cell phones were starting to become…

A queue pickup that ignored its limit, a plan cached while the table slept, and a consumer that deadlocked on its own success. The System, Briefly A staged pipeline processes events; each stage has a consumer composed of a fetcher goroutine and N = 10 workers per replica, two replicas per stage. Tasks live in a Postgres table, and a task’s stage is a column. A consumer picks up tasks by leasing them: UPDATE tasks SET picked_at = now() + $window, attempts = attempts + 1 WHERE id IN ( SELECT id…

Shuzo Fujimoto (picture by Dave Brill) on the back cover of BOS Magazine 226 (July 2004) October 27, 2026, marks the 104th birth anniversary of Shuzo Fujimoto. On this occasion, I’m publishing (with permission from the author) a picture of Fujimoto I recently rediscovered in my collection of origami magazines. The picture was taken by Dave Brill during his trip to Japan in December 2003 and appeared on the back cover of BOS Magazine 226 (July 2004).

My local comic shop had its Fall Lot Con today, and for the fist time since they started doing them, I decided to check it out. Basically, a bunch of vendors set up tents in the parking lot in front of the little strip mall in which the shop is located (all the other businesses in that section are closed on Sundays). There were a lot of people there selling wares and displaying things that I’m sure would be interesting if I were interested in those things, but I was mostly there for comics.…

Running tests in a watch mode encourages test-first thinking and creates a virtuous cycle. Here’s the command to run a Gradle Wrapper (Java) test suite in watch mode: ./gradlew test --continuous Gradle calls this a “continuous build.” It runs when tests or files under test change. Continuous Builds – Gradle Docs

I got back from NYC very late today and had a crazier time than normal because people on my flight had medical emergencies! This has never happened to me before in my entire life. I got to see the crew call for doctors/paramedics - and later for someone with an EpiPen to spare. Everything seems to have turned out OK, which is a relief. I did see the crew literally sprinting around the cabin though... big thumbs up to flight attendants... they have very serious training... they are your airborne…

I had a dream last night where I saw a UI mockup for how tape.deck cassettes could be rendered in a Netflix-style player, and you could add, modify, change the order of chapter blocks, or change the style or genre of the entire cassette. It didn’t *quite* look like this ChapGPT version below, but this conveys pretty well the idea I think of the approximate interface this kind of meta-narrative object might have within a playback environment.

The breaths has taken over my body, moving not only air, but the entire body is recreated and destroyed around the action of concentrating air. I can't remember how to do it any other way, than just being born and dying, multiple times per minute. Every hour, day and night.

I’ve made a number of enhancements to the comics aggregator, added a bunch of comics, and made others comics more reliable. This takes a lot of time. If you’re using the aggregator regularly and not supporting it on Patreon, you should feel bad. GoComics strips have returned. I have a workaround for being blocked by the site which doesn’t allow me to load comics in real-time, but I can get the loaded eventually. I am attempting to load all comics in the background throughout the day, so…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions. It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I…