The story begins with a tailor in a town…. That week, the richest merchant in town had ripped his pants in the ass, and the tailor sewed them up and returned them, and then the lady-in-waiting’s arm tore off, possibly because of a torrid affair with the coachman, the most lively and generous lover she’d ever had, and the tailor enjoyed hearing the reasons, told to him in hushed voices, as the clothing was turned in to him to mend, and each day he was busy repairing people’s activities,…

tldr; no running this week due to a mysterious injury Monday, 19/10/2026 Rest Day Tuesday, 20/10/2026 At 40 years old, sometimes your body likes to play tricks on you. Just standing still this morning, I felt a pain in my hamstring. It is now 8 hours later and its still causing me bother. Another rest day today, I’m afraid.The foam roller will need to be retrieved from the attic and I’ll do my best to get this working again. Wednesday, 21/10/2026 Still struggling with the hamstring. I’ve been…

The internet seems to be back on the “software is dead” bandwagon again. Most of this has come from a huge wave of cloned apps and recompilations of software which has been made possible due to Claude Opus 5.5 and the other frontier models. If you keep up with tech news you have probably heard of ArtCraft which has spent the last month creating open source alternatives to the Adobe suite and the Microsoft Office suite of apps. These are marked as early alpha, which basically means they are full…

Book review for The Mad Ship by Robin Hobb. I rated it 4 stars. This book is the second in the Liveship Traders trilogy - it's been a while since I've continued a book series so that at least gives some indication to it being an interesting book for me! A lot of the issues I had with the first book, Ship of Magic, persist in the second. Hobb's style of fantasy tends towards real and gritty, and not at all a comfy world that you would actually want to live in. There's sexual violence towards…

Error dashboard This sprint we did a bit of a handbrake turn and picked up a new little problem to work on. The team had become aware of a spike in errors and we wanted to explore if we could display these to users via the RAVS interface so that they could fix things themselves. These errors are caused later, when we send our data to other parts of the NHS, so they aren't things we can spot as the user completes the everyday parts of our service. Since it was quite a technical problem, I…

In recent years, life has changed a lot for all of us and sometimes not. Watching and listening to any news might leave anyone thinking about hoping in a future. But if you go back to the 1960s, as I can now, you will recall distinct similarities with the advent of nuclear threats with capabilities between two world powers as power-filled nations and a potential outcome that could signal the end of the world as we knew it. So what's changed? The goodness of our COVID year was a year of…

Kodiak is a brand-new theme for Bear Blog. It combines many of the things I’ve learned from making other themes, add-ons, and more. The idea to name it Kodiak, the world’s largest brown bear, has more to it than just being bear-related. It’s also the topic of the first book I remember ever having read as a kid: Monarch of Deadman Bay: The Life and Death of a Kodiak Bear by Roger A. Caras. So in a way, this theme connects my latest project with the first book I ever read. Of all the themes I’ve…

Crows in flight (photo by Mary Bailey via Creative Commons license on Flickr) 25 October 2026 Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock is back in town and they’re hanging out in my neighborhood. This week their numbers grew from 4,000 on Wednesday to 6,000 on Friday the 23rd. I expect 10,000 to 20,000 in time for the Christmas Bird Count on 26 December 2026. The best part is that this week they’ve been flying by my window! video by Kate St. John Where are they going? I don’t know. I’m too busy counting.

<고요네 가족신문> 창간호에 실린 경제 특집 기사입니다. 코스피 차트가 파도처럼 일렁이는 요즘. 산신령도 백기를 들 정도로 어렵다는 코스피 투자를 생후 89일 아기 강고요에게 맡겼다. 강고요에게는 5일간 코스피를 최대 5주까지 구매할 기회가 주어졌다. 아기 투자자 강고요를 모시는 아빠 강민석은 아래와 같은 질문을 던졌다. “고요야, 오늘 코스피 오를까? 내릴까? 내리면 왼쪽, 오르면 오른쪽 손을 들어줘.” DAY 1: 오후 1:45 고요의 오른손이 왼손보다 아주 조금 더 올라감. 코스피는 이미 5%가량 하락 중. 고요가 상승장이 온다는 계시를 보내는 것 같아 코스피 1주 구매. 코스피는 -5.12%로 마감. DAY 2: 오전 8:40 아빠가 코스피 등락을 묻자 고요는 똥방구를 내뿜으면서 왼손을 치켜듦. 지독한 하락장을 예측하는 듯. 오늘은 코스피 구매하지 않기로 결정. 고요의 예측과 달리 코스피는 1.62% 상승. DAY 3: 오후 1:40 신난 고요가 오른손을 크게 들어 올림.…

First thing this AM after posting the blog I went to the VA to pick up a Rx. I finally got a hold of pulmonary and they gave me a new Rx. It is for managing the cough but when I got to the VA the pharmacy was closed. No weekend pickups. I should have gone on friday but I didn't want to deal with the school bus traffic. I'll have to go back on monday to get it. Which is just as well because the doc told me to make sure that I get my flu and COVID shots up to date. With my current lung issues…

Mi faris tion hieraŭ vespere kiam mi estis tre laca. Mi ridis ĝis singluti. 🤣 Mi ne scias kial mi juĝas ĝin tiom amuza. #lang_eo #esperanto #meme #memes #memeo #memeoj #polarbearcafe #vespermanĝo #dinner #friends #amikoj #eating #manĝi #food #manĝaĵo #shirokumacafe

After Muhammad's death, the Muslim world expanded its reach quickly. Within a century, its reach extended from modern-day Afghanistan and India in the east to the southern border of France (and all around the Mediterranean).One result of this influence was the adoption of Arabic by Christian writers. Christian authors wrote explanations of their faith in Arabic to reach a wider audience.The 11th-century Nestorian Archbishop Elijah of Nisibis was one of these, choosing to write several works in…

Robb’s Weeknote #2023 pointed me to Sophie’s Digital recipe management for fastidious cooks and that forced me to think again about the no-longer-very-plastic plastic folder I have crammed with physical copies of recipes torn from all sorts of places. Roughly every three months, as I shift scraps of paper in search for one I know is in there, I swear to myself I will, like Sophie, snap them and OCR the image. I haven’t, and I never will, but I give myself points for thinking about it. Of…

Yours truly has been far from home again, this time strutting the streets and trekking the trails of the Republic of Armenia. I travel for history; I travel for food and drink; and, most importantly and on-brand-ly, I travel for language. Just as you might savour the aroma of an outlandish vintage or cuisine, I find immersion in a different linguistic milieu deeply stimulating and enjoyable. Over six days, Armenia, what with its distinctive alphabet and flavour of Indo-European, served up such…

Clear and cold. A few minutes before sunrise, with crows already noising about, a pair of screech owls start duetting up on the ridge, fierce high tremolos descending into tender trills.

Wei to go.

Cora, a pilot, needs help. Signy, an introverted plant shop owner, may be the only one who can. Really enjoyed this. Very Becky Chambers. Lovely characters, interesting world-building, humanity and gentleness. Can’t wait to finish the story whenever the sequel comes out. ★★★★☆

Someone gave me feedback the other day. But they didn’t just hand over comments. They took the time to understand what I was actually solving for. Then they shared a revised version based on what they thought could help. And they added a short note: no pressure if this doesn’t land, feel free to ignore it, this stuff isn’t easy. I felt elevated by the way they carried themselves through the whole thing. It was one of those experiences when the exercise of receiving feedback felt like a…

Real Estate - Poem

Note: This review, as with all content I write on this site, is my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of others, including the American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI), the cutlery trade group that I advise on legal matters.I reviewed an F5.5. I liked it. It was brass so it was heavy, but it was also larger than it had to be for my needs. Nonetheless for a year or two I was cyberstalking the Urban EDC Supply webpage, looking for an F5.5 in lighter materials. I saw a carbon fiber one and…

Daily Drawing 1029

Softpanorama - A “(slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting “Back to basics” movement against IT overcomplexity and bastardization of classic Unix”. Well worth spending a couple hours digging through the hypertext document that this site provides. Free Blockbuster - All you need in order to setup a Local Blockbuster like the little libraries that have become ubiquitous. Tiny Planet: Earth - Fantastic ShaderToy by the computational graphics wizard, Morgan McGuire. McGuire is the author…

What a week. It was planned to be a very relaxed week with mostly food, drinks, conversations and not much else. Which it almost was. I was quite lucky on Wednesday when the whole patch business started that it was a very rainy day anyway, so I could patch my little server here without disrupting the vacation proceedings too much.If you want to read more about what happened there, I can really recommend the blog post by Larry Garfield about The real lessons of php2shell and the posts he links…

This week, the case studies on my portfolio got their rewrite and are finally live. I might do some tweaks here and there, and a couple of other things on my folio need handling, but they can wait their turn. Instead, I published a new post yesterday, totally unplanned. I also poked around this blog and made a few minor updates. It has had the same layout for the last two years or so, so I decided to take it slow. I added tags to posts, refreshed the dark theme colours, and gave the Now Playing…

. The latest issue of History Today has a feature on investigative journalism. Academics Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery argue in ‘The undercover Victorians’ that this was a Victorian invention. Their book, Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction is published by Cambridge University Press. ___ >Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (CUP, 2025)>History Today app edition

Vasilissa lies to me about where she goes at night.The two-legged hut in the woods; ok, I know,but dare not enter. In daylight, gone like smoke,and the hearth cold as though it never was.And Vasilissa amiable, quiet

Pavement chalk flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Imagine your sidewalk could talk — what would it say, in the form of a small poem or prose? I wrote a poem about my pavement. We live on a busy road with a school over the road, so there are a lot of people walking up an down throughout the day. Who’s that walking overhead? Who’s that walking on my head? Pounding, stamping on my head Oh how I wish that you would stop I took…

A recent magazine cover: Central Park West past the reservoir, with 285 Central Park West on the left: That photo is a cropped version of this remarkable panorama by Ed Yourdon: Hat-tip to Tim for caching this one.

Back in July, I reviewed a long out-of-print, practically forgotten Dutch mystery novel, De dood kwam door de sneeuw (Death Came Through the Snow, 1957) by Frits de Winter, but, as some of you know by now, the quality of Dutch detective fiction is all over the place – nearly impossible to gauge quality beforehand. That's because not much has been written about them for decades or even reviewed. It doesn't help that nothing ever gets reprinted in this country.I likened trying to track down…