Daily Drawing 907
I’m extremely fortunate that the university library has a rather relaxed view of lending limits for staff (or that I borrow the kind of books nobody else wants to read…) as I’ve had my current crop of loans for several months now. I’m slowly making my way through them, though, and today sees me covering another one, a book I’ve been wanting to try for many years now. It’s a lovely collection of eighteenth-century stories from Japan, and if you fancy something a little different, if not uncanny,…
A couple weeks ago I wrote that your organization has to learn as fast as your best AI adopter. Externalize, combine, socialize, internalize. Run Nonaka’s spiral or get left behind. A bunch of you wrote back with the same question: okay, but where does the knowledge actually go?
This week I stood at a primary school careers fair, on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, and tried to convince children between the ages of four and eleven that software development is the best job in the world. I had a stand, a looping deck of slides, a board of brand logos, and a game I had built for them to play. By the end of the day my shirt was stuck to my back, the hall felt like the inside of a kettle, and I had enjoyed myself more than I have at almost…
Cthulhu Eternal has become my preferred Lovecraftian RPG system: free to use (including commercially), the publisher hasn't got into NFTs or AI art, and it's broadly compatible with other Lovecraftian games.
IMPERIAL REMNANT STORMTROOPER (Pauldron) The Vintage Collection 3 3/4-Inch Hasbro Pulse Exclusive 4-Pack Item No.: No. G32115 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: n/a Includes: Blaster pistol, blaster rifle Action Feature: n/a Retail: $67.99 Availability: April 2026 Appearances: The Mandalorian and Grogu Bio: Figures inspired by the live-action Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu movie. (Taken from the web site description. They're really not trying hard for this movie.) Image: Adam's photo lab.…
Why skip past the why When someone says “I run Qwen 3.6 at 25 tokens per second”, or makes any similar performance claim about their self-hosted LLM setup, this is only meaningful if we know several other things. Which model variant? Qwen 3.6 could be the dense 27B or the 35B-A3B MoE, totally different architectures. Better, just link to the repo you downloaded the weights from. Which quantization? Q8, Q4_K_XL, and IQ3_XXS are at different points in quality/speed/size space. What hardware and…
Whilst I’m still uncertain as to the form, concept or design for any future Prairie themed project I am certain it will require N scale…We have been here before… first with the Englewood logging project, more recently with Albion Yard (CP on Vancouver Island) and Hanna (Rio Grande, Creede branch). Each time struggling with one aspect of the scale and theme and things never quite sitting well before selling up and moving onto a new distraction. So you’d be welcome to ask, why will this be any…
The new social network W Social - which purports to be a healthier alternative to Elon Musk’s X, “made in Europe, for the world” - would be a fascinating case study for future business school seminars. Its debut has been messy, filled with controversies - and yet, it has been embraced by high profile personalities from the worlds of politics and journalism. I am about to cover its biggest scandal yet, which puts into question W Social’s core promise: “Trust your feed”.A quick recapW Social was…
It's been very hot in the UK* for the last week, so much so that the weather agency issued a warning, suggesting people should not travel unless they really need to. The last few days have been challenging, sleep-wise. Our bedroom is like a furnace even with an oscillating fan roaring away and three nights of broken sleep have left me feeling a bit rough. On the way into work I stopped off at the shops and bought a chocolate bar and a can of "Viking Berry" Monster Juiced energy drink, which I…
My regular morning view from the hotel gym, looking out across the Rosebank suburb of Johannesburg. When last week’s Sun City-based conference was announced, I decided to extend my stay in South Africa so that I could spend some time with our team members who are based there. It wasn’t perfect timing; Tuesday was a public holiday for Youth Day, so many people chose to take Monday as leave in order to get a four-day weekend. But the time I did get to spend with the team and other colleagues from…
Scotland are floundering at the World Cup and right now everybody knows this is close to nowhere. I'm not in Boston but my t-shirt came from there a few days ago. I'm not in Miami either. I'm in the hoose. I wore it and hoped the t-shirt would be a lucky talisman for the Brazil game. The magic sparkle of a lone couch and TV supporter sending good vibes. Sadly not this time. We've been here before.Scotland have scored one goal in three matches. Now we wait for everyone's success or failure in…
How a kickboxer built an empire on male insecurity and called it freedom. Steve the Hypothetical Gerbil says: This one’s about Andrew Tate. There’s organised crime, a subscription model, and a man who rents Bugattis. I’d summarise it but Paul won’t let me near the keyboard. Steve the Gerbil is also the Head of Communications at JustRodents.com You can read more about him there. About a year ago I watched Adolescence on Netflix. It was a story about a 13-year-old schoolboy who murdered a girl…
Some sad news to share on the blog this week: the passing of Exidy co‑founder and arcade pioneer Howell Ivy. His impact on the early years of arcade gaming is undoubted. After serving in the US Air Force, working on missile instrumentation and drone systems operation, Howell entered the arcade industry in 1972 when Ramtek hired him after seeing his home‑built video game prototype that was inspired after seeing and playing a Computer Space arcade machine out in the wild. Howell photographed…
A splash of colour - Dumbo, New York, USA, 2014-07 The first time I visited New York I really didn’t enjoy it. I arrived with my sister on the way back from New Zealand. We were broke and exhausted. I’ve since been back a couple of times and enjoyed it slightly more. Whilst I have no plans to visit in the near future, I do have some fond memories of wandering around the streets in different parts of the city. When we were here, we wandered into a small gallery that was dedicated to art that…
Has anyone mentioned it's been a bit hot in Europe recently? With 34° - 36° C forecast for today, and red weather warnings for heat from the Met Office, I thought it best to stay indoors in the cool shade of the house. Then I thought I'd write a blog post, because it has been a week or so since I last posted. I know you'll be getting a bit impatient for new posts to read here by now. (That was sarcasm) While it's been heatwave hot, I've been getting up at 6am in order to have my breakfast and…
A Bluetooth T9/multitap keyboard built around the actual keypad of a Nokia E52, talking to a phone or laptop. The engineering is lovely and unfussy–Alps switches, a proper battery circuit, ZMK underneath–and I admire the discipline of doing one small thing really well instead of disappearing down the mechanical-keyboard rabbit hole. I understand the nostalgia, somewhat: multitap was muscle memory for precisely one generation, mine included, and I can still feel the rhythm even if I don’t miss…
Trying to escape the heatwave and the hottest June week ever in western Europe, we headed first to the Belgian coast (a cool 24 degrees) and then to Switzerland and Liechtenstein (both a sweltering 36 degrees). Belgium Switzerland Liechtenstein
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to…
Here’s a story that is both totally absurd and a lesson on how not to think about risk. In the early nineties, the US Environmental Protection Agency got into a fight with a company over a toxic waste dump in New Hampshire. The company had already spent a fortune cleaning the site up. They’d removed enough toxic chemicals that a child could safely play there and even eat small amounts of dirt 70 days a year. But the EPA weren’t satisfied. They wanted the chemical levels lower. So low that it…
It's time for even more November 20th, 1980 photos from the grounds of the Disneyland Hotel - photos taken by Lou Perry, and scanned and shared with us by his daughter, Sue B. It's hard to believe that these are over 45 years old!The Marina was built in 1970, and changed the look and feel of the Hotel in a major way - it's fairly incredible that they devoted so much space to this miniature "ocean". But I love a good water feature. Especially a swamp; I told Jack Wrather that people want to see…
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug (2013)
Looking at South Redondo Beach from Palos Verdes. The large silver building in the distance is Sofi Stadium, one of the venues where the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament is taking place. レドンド・ビュー パロス・ベルデスからサウス・レドンド・ビーチを眺めた光景だ。遠くに見える大きな銀色の建物は、FIFAワールドカップの開催会場の一つである SoFiスタジアムだ。
Woman with Hand in Hair, Lee Miller, 1931. I woke up at 6am so here’s a quick link dump before I head out to work. On existential cringe / reading another Ben Lerner book and one of the characters talks about milieu therapy / Slavenka Drakulić was pretty kick ass and I hope her last book comes out in English some day / on colours you can’t see on screens / putting a hat on a hat is a terrific expression / my friend Scott wrote an excellent essay about trillionaires / if i could afford the time…
Went to Ashford outlet mall with a monstrous toothache in 30°C heat. I didn't make the most of it.87 words · 1 image
Just in time for pride month, wow. [canned studio laughter] I'll admit, this one took longer to write because it's longer than my usual film reviews. In the past, even before this blog, I'd just do short reviews. I've had this sitting in my drafts because it became more than just reviews and sort of thoughts, sort of analyses. The initial draft was more joke-y and feral but I started fleshing the review out and pruning sentences and, gah. Writer's block or writer's fatigue. I shelved the draft,…
Cal Newport has a useful framing for knowledge work: every active project carries administrative overhead. A project includes the work itself, but also the emails, bugs, customer questions, alerts, and old decisions that create ongoing work and context shifts. As the number of active projects grows, the fixed overhead starts to crowd out the real work. I have been feeling that overhead in my own projects. When I started Contraption Company, I imagined a small studio building many calm,…
It’s real, and it’s the exact opposite of what the far right says it is. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th June 2026 “If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin,” the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, asked last week, “how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.” It is. But there is another way of describing the actions of the rioters burning people out of their homes in Belfast, though ministers somehow cannot bring themselves to…
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