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…

One thing I’ve always loved the homebrew scene, particularly when it involves old hardware, is when someone decides that a console or handheld should be capable of doing something it was never designed for, spends an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to make it happen, and eventually emerges with a working piece of software that nobody would have thought possible. Sometimes it's a remarkably faithful port of a game, sometimes an entirely new emulator, and occasionally it's something…

Five and a half years ago, I wrote about my frustration with the machine of political fundraising as it operates in the U.S. I didn’t think I would be moved to write about it again, 1 except things have gotten worse (so, so much worse) in this area in the intervening time. ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ Despite the attempted insurrection on January 6, early 2021 was a more optimistic time. 2 Few of us would have predicted that Biden’s presidency would be barely a half-assed respite from the relentless fascism.…

Sunday Asides #118 My new part-time job kicked off this week...sorta. Monday was supposed to be my start date, but I hadn't signed a contract, gotten a company email address, or been given access to any of their tools to do my job. I spoke to my supervisor briefly on Wednesday since he was travelling for a conference, but he didn't seem eager to talk with me at all, let alone provide me what I needed to actually begin working. He said we'd talk on Friday once he was back from the…

Seven months have passed since I last wrote a blog post here. Since then at least seven new AI models have been released, at least seven new sandboxes have been escaped from, and way more than seven annoying tasks have been handled for me by AI. But way more than seven things are also now bothering me about our current use of AI.

I asked two LLMs what itinerary I should use for my trip to London. I'd already decided on what attractions to visit, but I wanted some options on how make best use of our time in the capital. Below you'll see my prompt and the replies from Claude and ChatGPT. I used the desktop applications for both LLMs. Claude was using the Opus 5.5 model and ChatGPT was set to "extra high" thinking effort. The Prompt I am going to London, UK. I am travelling with my 7 year old. We arrive on Wednesday at…

Vega VI Vitamin K Based in Berlin, German-Danish musician Vega VI creates a kind of glitch-dream-pop sound that channels the dramatic dance energy of Robyn but combines it with the more artful experimentation of Lyle Li, Björk, and Portishead. The result, as heard here on Vitamin K, is twitchy kind of electronic pop. It throbs with crunchy percussion and layered synth tones, an alienated and robotic piece created for our AI age. Brittle, hollow melodies arc and sway like robotic arms, and Vega…

It’s always sad when a service you’ve used is shutting down. Foursquare (the end) was one where I saw it coming for a long time, but that does only to some degree soften the blow. Foursquare (and later Swarm) was the service that introduced me to location-based services. My first check-in was on 2010-01-10 while exploring the city of Graz, where I had moved to a few months earlier. From then on, pretty much all the way up to 2019, I’ve used the service to keep track of all the places I visited…

I’m not sure what I was expecting or wanting to get from Breaking Things at Work. The Luddites were right about why you hate your job by Gavin Mueller, but it didn’t really grab me. Maybe it’s more useful for folk who haven’t thought about these sort of matters as much. Hopefully the title draws in more people who are looking for ways out of the sort of jobs I don’t have (thankfully). Anyway, here are my dog-eared sections from reading it. Page 14 Our history is the Luddites’ as well, and their…

This week we explore the “disability dongle” problem, ecommerce accessibility issues that get customers stuck, and the double-edged sword of AI-generated prototypes. Also, don’t miss some horror graphic novels for Halloween and a gaming database for parents!

#SilentSunday

It's been more quiet here because I've had increased health issues, and have been focusing more on other things, especially my degree and gaming! I have some unfinished drafts, but they'll release some other time soon :) Same with emails! I've been playing FFXIV since end of June, and just started Shadowbringers. I love the game, and recently had some fun with the integrated photomode (group pose). Just wanted to share some shots from that here. She's kinda a mix of my real life self and the Au…

My former colleague at Nottingham University, Philip Moriarty, alerted me to a piece in the latest Private Eye (No. 1686) about the parlous state of affairs there. The teaser on the left shows a bit more than Philip did in his post, but if you want to read the rest you should buy a copy of the Eye. Next to the story about Nottingham University, you will find one about Edinburgh University, which you will want to read if you work there… The video that appeared in a previous post about Nottingham…

Craft beer people tend to agree that it’s worth paying extra for quality but how much better does a beer need to taste to cost more than three times as much? It’s exciting to be able to buy imported Helles beers from both Augustiner and Tegernsee at Sainsbury’s, while we’re picking up canned tuna, Woolite and ‘crispy nuggets’. And £3.40 a bottle doesn’t seem like a terrible price, either. But then you see four 500ml cans of Rheinbacher Pilsner at Aldi for £3.99 and you think, hmm, now, I’ve…

difficult… like a fitted sheet, you’ve always been hardto handle.brutally honest with abig heart–our similarities. the differences tap-danced all over us–you’d pussyfootaround certain topics, choosingto avoid what stared youin the face, while Ican’t unsee things whenthey’ve been seen. we were destined to break.the charmer and the charmedcan never be equal. you knew that, didn’t you?

Volcanic rock caps the top of North Table Mountain in Golden, Colorado. These rocks are what remains of lava flows more than 60 million years old, and it has held up against erosion that stripped away the softer layers around it. The result is the flat-topped mesa that overlooks the town. The post Basalt Rim appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Software can be finished We don’t need this many interpreted web languages. More generally we don’t need half a dozen open source libraries doing the same thing. Sometimes the mature thing can be even for a project that is very ‘successful’—especially if that success is by now mostly toxic—to consider the project finished, cut a final release and archive the repos. php programming software sustainability 🔖 Computing As Social…

Our texts sound like a clan [sic] rally. – a cop, of course Here’a a seasonal “Silly Symphonies” cartoon from 1929; the links above it were provided by Franklin Harris, Nun Ya, IncarcerNation (x3), Tracy Quan, and Reason, in that order. R.I.P. Michael Gray. “Smart” appliances aren’t. Cops are a menace to society. Cop attacks woman for having a daughter. The poison fruit of the “strict liability” tree. Another great moment in artificial stupidity. They never stop demonstrating exactly what they…

#Leaving BearBlog After giving it quite a lot of thought, I’ve finally left BearBlog and moved to a self hosted setup with Hugo. Happily I have the knowledge and means to do this and hopefully can keep finding the inspiration and time to keep writing and maintain the site as well. If anything doesn’t work then someone please let me know. It should all be nicely setup, fully https, images on a subdomain and everything logging and lovely, but still its possible I’ve missed something.

Heron flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

1: My first iPod was a blue iPod mini. My last iPod was an iPod touch. It was only about four years between the two purchases, but the iPod era was huge for Apple. 2: I really liked the iPod earphones; they were comfortable for my ears. But they do easily break. And I did buy a lot of earphones from Apple. 3: Except for the earphones, I never bought any iPod accessories from Apple. Not the iPod Hi-Fi, nor the iPod socks. The socks are silly, in my opinion. 4: I am not a music person. But I…

Cosa non mi convince nella corsa ai data center italiani, dalla Puglia al Trentino – 5 Things That Used to Be Normal and Are Now a Luxury The Quiet Decision Microsoft Made That Devastated Thousands of Nonprofits – a simple ad-blocker should bypass the paywall (i have one and did not notice there was one) lowering your life’s requirements – a note by Leo Babauta What happens to our blogs when we die? Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH

Resources for Apple’s Find My device and item-location network. Resources CategoryDateLinkNotesProjects2026FindMyWebOpen-source project for building owned item trackers using Apple Find My; includes a web interface, a FindMy.py-based backend and custom Zephyr tracker firmware. Google Find My Device and SmartThings are not implemented