US Coast by Martin Finke just started playing at random while I was eating breakfast… Man, that’s a good tune. So here’s the demo version, too:

I don’t know how those extremely short blurbs for movies on TV streaming platforms are generated. Are they thrown together by the work experience kind or are they just farmed out to AI, which then pretends to be the work experience kid?Whatever the case, it doesn’t appear to be anybody/thing that is experienced in discourse around cinema. Look at this example, for the 1937 thriller Sabotage, which on Amazon Prime is described as “Hitchcockian”. Now anyone who spends too much time talking about…

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).The Latest Drippings ☕️I Discovered a Sound That Leaks Your Exact Location (and It's Everywhere). Well, this is both wonderfully geeky and terrifying. This video describes a technique that…

Sunrise, November 5, 2026In any year, at least in my home here in the very center of the United States, November is a month of change. The winds bring the transition from the warm, humid air of summer to the colder, drier air of winter. The winds also bring the birds!Winds sometimes bring pelicans!Sometimes these changes are slow and subtle. Sometimes they are dramatic. Sometimes they come with wild swings in pressure. Sometimes they are more gentle. However they come, they always come in…

This is a continuation to the past two blog posts I have made about coding and AI. After quite a lot of soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that I will actively not be using any LLMs or AI agents in my professional work. It's been quite a rollercoaster this year, to say the least. There have been excellent articles and opinion pieces that have resonated with me and my feelings around AI usage. In this blog post I will list my biggest dealbreakers on why I won't be using LLMs in my…

We are promised a forced proximity, enemies to lovers femdom romance. It would be a bit more accurate to describe this as a story about a stalker, who conspires with a vulnerable woman’s friends to manipulate her into a third chance with him. Answering whether or not I enjoyed this is complicated. I was definitely entertained and the femdom sex scenes were excellent, but I don’t think the author was trying to write psychological horror. Which, unfortunately, is a lot closer to the reading…

Have you ever wondered how people get pulled into cults? It's because they offer easy answers to problems1. You don't have to worry about how to live your life, some guru will tell you how to live it. For many it gives them the justification to hate people that make them feel uncomfortable instead of confronting their feelings. Do trans people make you feel uncomfortable, well many religious groups hate them and you can too if you join up. Then once you've started to buy in to the cult, you tie…

Long Island’s racist past – of Klan parades, cross burnings, and redlining – has been the cause of much frustration, anger, and devastation. In my explorations, though, I’ve also discovered hope, in the form of people and institutions actively resisting racial violence and discrimination. I myself haven’t given up hope that bigotry in all forms will NOT be our legacy (despite the world in which we currently find ourselves). “The Horror” takes a stab (pun intended) into Long Island’s complicated…

I have very strong views on lying to kids: I think you both should and shouldn't do it. "Lying" covers a range, including saying things that hurt your kids and your relationship with them, and others that help them grow into an appropriately skeptical adult. The distinction is whether I'm leaving them believing something false. For example, if my kids were asking for ice cream and I thought they'd already had too much sugar, I might be tempted to say "sorry, we're out of ice cream." Or if…

hmm.......First off, the stand offs on the back of the frog had rust on them. Removing the japanning on the frog is being a bit more stubborn than the plane body. I tired to remove the japanning with 4-0 steel wool and nada. The steel wool didn't remove one bit. I next tried a steel wire brush and got the same result on both the main casting and the frog. The japanning is scraping off easily but not as easily as I expected it to be. After two full days in the Simple Green bath I thought it…

I'm still living in Dublin, Ireland. I love my space here. I can see the sea from my living room and I'm surrounded by my records and books. After 40 years of corporate employment, I recently launched my own business 'Matt Rutherford Coaching' where I deliver one-to-one Career and Leadership Coaching. I started an email newsletter six years ago called "Stuff that MattR's", it has evolved into a great way of sharing career and development advice to a growing list of curious people. In September,…

I got a call Saturday evening that showed up as Google. An automated voice asked me to press one to confirm I was Rohan. A follow-up call came from someone on Google’s security team, investigating a breach on my account. They told me to check the Google support portal, where I’d see a ticket raised in my name. I checked. There was nothing there. They didn’t miss a beat. No problem, they said, we’re already on it. Then a notification arrived saying someone had tried to log into my account and…

I've been a bit down on our choice to install a solar battery and my most recent attempt to make the finances work didn't really make things any better. Ultimately, though, that money is gone and financial savings are not the only benefit that a battery can bring, so I decided to try and focus more on other aspects instead. One of the main benefits of a solar install, in general, is that it offsets carbon: allowing us to consume low-carbon electricity rather than energy freshly zapped out of a…

A red-shouldered hawk watching from above (photo by Mark Moschell via Flickr Creative Commons license) 8 November 2026 Last month the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center in Roanoke reported they have an adult female red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) in their care who was brought in because she was grounded. It took a while to figure out why because she’s healthy and uninjured. She simply couldn’t fly because she weighed too much. The typical weight for a female red-shouldered hawk is 700g but…

Is anyone else SICK AND TIRED of the way hotels now foist plastic "keycards" on guests? No! I don't want tap to open my door! No! I don't want to keep the card in my wallet! No! I don't want electronics in control of my life! What if I need to stab an attacker? Keys are great for that by flimsy plastic cards are useless Gives us PROPER keys with big keyrings that we have to hand in to reception when we go out and then ask for when we come back. That is exactly what you sound like when you…

This win is not about the Democratic party or the Republican party, it’s much bigger than that. There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way. James Talarico, via Letters from an American

Amit Merchant argues that skills, prompts, plugins, and MCP servers are becoming dependencies of AI agents, and should be versioned and managed like application code. He also highlights APM as a way to install reproducible agent tooling, with Dependabot now able to keep those dependencies up to date. Read more

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Ben Nadel look at how "multipart/form-data" changes form submissions; and how he might be able to polyfill bracket notation ("[]") for file upload requests....

every time I play video games with my wife, she notices all sorts of secrets and stuff that I don't which always makes me wonder: how many are just vanishing under my nose when she's not around?

Review from: Jackson’s Lane, London; 23rd October 2026 Roxana Küwen Arsalan doesn’t so much begin her show as recruit us[…] The post ‘OMÂ’ by Roxana Küwen Arsalan / Cie Bolbol appeared first on The Circus Diaries.

Last night was lusciously misty and just the right kind of cold. Today’s newsletter is out. STARLOG magazine is relaunching, apparently as an annual just came across this: weird book dealer Lock Books Austin Kleon mini-posters about making stuff, v useful and timely Today I am thinking about connecting this notebook to Substack as a syndication. A lot will depend on whether I can disable comments and whether or not I can be arsed to do it at all. (Via Pink Beam Press) STATUS: once I have beaten…

This is nice: https://hellopomma.comFeels like an old-school internet of things thing.

Getting rid of a console usually means making peace with leaving a backlog behind, but the Linux gaming ecosystem keeps chipping away at those walled gardens. Enter Xodus Nexus, a rather cheeky piece of software that bridges the gap between Microsoft’s ecosystem and Linux devices like my Bazzite powered ROG handheld. Installing it is simple enough via terminal: It… Source

Expand imageIt took precisely 0 hours for her to assume ownership of my bed As I had expected, being back home has been quite relaxing and somewhat boring so there isn’t a whole lot to talk about. I’ve also been rather lazy about journaling which further hampers the whole journal to week note pipeline. Personal I’ve spent a good chunk of the week just catching up with friends and family; and helping out with things at home wherever I can as we headed into Diwali. I was rather surprised to…

A classic November morning: cold, gray and blustery, but seasoned with sparrow song. The lilac’s last few green leaves flutter like loose flyers for some long-gone circus.

§ Last Sunday I stopped by the Apple Store to check out the new iPhone Duo. It seems really fun and the hardware feels great. It is also really expensive! I would be lying if I said I don’t feel an annoying urge to buy one. With that said, it certainly doesn’t seem like a good way to achieve my goal of using my phone less. § On Tuesday I voted in the November midterm elections. I couldn’t be more happy with the results nationwide and in Ohio in particular. It has been a while since I’ve felt…

I loved this post on the Futility Closet last month: With best play on both sides, conventional tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) is always a draw. Played in three dimensions, though, in a 3×3×3 cube, it’s always a win for whichever player manages to take the central cell. In fact, a draw is impossible — there’s no way to fill the “board” with 14 crosses and 13 noughts without completing one or more winning paths. One of my favourite games in the Windows Entertainment Pack series was…

It’s been a while since I posted about Alex T breaking the NES Tetris world record and it’s been broken twice since then: once by dogplayingtetris with a score of 29,486,164 and and then by BlueScuti last year who eclipsed it with 40,264,954. The video above shows his journey to that record-breaking score and that familiar rolling technique sound. I thought it was funny when he was wearing the Dr Pepper t-shirt and had the single white glove as it reminded me of that Jackson’s Dr Pepper jingle.…

There’s a reason that abandoned hospitals have been the setting for so much horror fiction. That’s the Seaman’s Retreat on Staten Island, built in the 1830s.