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

My review of Metakosmos, the new duo album by Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch, is now available at All About Jazz. Across eight pieces, the Greek and Swiss pianists bring melodic luminosity and rhythmic precision into an intimate exchange, exploring how attentive listening allows two distinct musical imaginations to create a shared world. Repetition becomes a means of discovering difference, while dampened strings, submerged strummings, and percussive accents reveal unexpected voices within the…

two deck reading, kind of a variation on that historical spread - majors on top, minors on bottom, except i decided the fully scenic deck (aquarian tarot) will function as the majors and the pip deck (trionfi della luna) will stand in for the pips. ironic that there's two majors in the pip row lol. and yes, it's one week before the official start of november, so - as is traditional - the november decks came out. the cards drawn were: 7 of swords, 6 of rods, page of swords in the top row 2 of…

Resources for Nintendo Switch emulation, native game runtimes and recompilation. Resources CategoryDateLinkNotesEmulators2024sudachiAnother yuzu fork 2023RyujinxVery good performance on Apple Silicon Recompilation and runtimes2026Savage Wind RecompWork-in-progress static recompilation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 1.9.0 for native Windows and Linux; alpha currently playable through the Great Plateau, requiring the user’s own game files MacNativeGamesBuilds native Apple-silicon apps…

Roughly Sep 20 - Oct 25 It's been a while and I have no idea how time passed... Running Regular runs from 6km to 10km. Not too consistent with long runs as I wished, mainly due to some weekends were occupied by classes (which are good block mode), but then you go to work the next day totally not rested. I have an upcoming uni 4k run this Friday, I'm looking forward to it. Reading I finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and also The Prisoner of Azkaban, and The Order of Phoenix. Feeling…

I setup the zine exchange club a few months back. I like zines as a window into what interests people and how they try to build a consistent narrative. It’s better than the odd isolated photo posted here or there on social media to understand photographers because you need to create a story that can sustain attention, and that requires investing more of yourself into the object than the throw away photograph. In a way they remind me of photojournalism at the personal level. My zines are…

A dull day but a bit warmer. No cars today. had a flood and a blocked drain in lab T. Got drain to go after a lot of work. A load of oil came.

Ten years ago, I was living with two flatmates in a big Parisian flat. Once or twice a year, we organised a party, which gathered up to 90 people, a number we were rather proud of. During those parties, there was a consistent, yet slightly annoying pattern for us as organisers: the best discussions were bound to take place in the kitchen, rarely in our big living room, where we were concentrating our efforts to entertain the party with food, drinks, and music. You see, the kitchen was the room…

What I wish I knew, but had to learn in the process of building a drone.

Open source in its current form doesn’t make sense anymore. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is still true but now we have artificial eyeballs. - What I Believe About the Future of Software Development I’m not exactly sure what this means. In theory artificial eyeballs will find it cheap and easy to file an easy-to-verify issue or, more likely, put up a PR to fix it. But perhaps it means that having a small group of human maintainers well get overwhelming? Or that bots are less…

Felix Dennis wrote that "The transition from poverty to comfort is a massive leap in human happiness. The transition from comfort to wealth is an exercise in diminishing returns." This reads quaintly in our era, where even the supposed "poor" live beyond previous notions of comfort and even wealth. But it's not quaint for me. I spent most of my adult life well short of comfort. In fact, I was the poorest person I knew—never earning more than a pittance while doing respected work in seven…

9724/21643My secret guests at tomorrow's RHLSTP are Mat and Jim from off of Ghosts (I can tell you that because I am writing this on the way home from the gig), so this morning Phoebe and me went to Cineworld in Stevenage to see Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. It's a lot of fun, loads of laughs (I laughed so much at one point that Phoebe told me off for being embarrassing), but also some lovely moving moments, but maybe I just identify too much with Pat, because he made me cry twice.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved array filtering. (Note that this ends today.)

This month, I left my role as a senior agent at Writers House to launch an advisory practice for thought leaders. I’ll continue to represent a select list of nonfiction clients at another agency, but I’m closed to submissions.To explain my reasoning in typically circuitous manner: This summer, I became obsessed with intheweights.com. It’s a website that does one thing: you type in a name, and it tells you how strongly different AI models recognize that person and what they think they know about…

How can decision models be so fast compared to LLMs? OpenAI has said its Decisions API runs on a specialised GPT-6 Luna, and all TypeSafe has said about Jev is that it has a “new architecture” and a “parallel sampler”. So does this mean that these models are a completely new architectures, or that they are built leveraging LLMs? Thankfully, Cloudflare’s Clef, released two weeks after Jev, and by being an open weight model, it comes with the recipe and the underlying architecture that has…

Archivist Christine Roussel has written a terrific new book about the background and identification of the faces in an iconic Depression-era photo: "Lunch on a Beam" (shown on the cover, above). Being a native New Yorker, I was riveted (pun intended) by this photograph taken high in the sky in the heart of Manhattan, an image so familiar and yet associated with so many questions. Even the Wikipedia page may not have all the answers dug out by Christine Roussel, though it has some other…

Hello GMT. It’s been wet and windy, but today’s a beautiful sunny autumn day. Three gyms. I got my flu vaccination, and somehow this one didn’t hurt at all. I’m making slow but steady progress in Order of the Sinking Star. It takes long enough to solve each puzzle that the bookending doses of noxious chat are few and far between. The puzzles — at this stage of the game — are still quite good, and I haven’t got completely stuck yet. I’m still curious enough to keep going and see what happens…

From the outside, there’s no change. Readable output. Same stylistic choices. The cover is like a fitted sheet. Easily transplanted onto whatever can fit its shape. I think it’s the same, but the longer you look the more you notice. Some valleys have been smoothed over. There are new bumps yet to be discovered. You’re seeing what I’m seeing. Of that I’m sure. Maybe not here, specifically, but when it comes to mapping familiar structures over re-invented internal blueprints. A liminal space to…

The Alington Inheritance by Patricia Wentworth published 1958[excerpt] When she came into the drawing-room Mac was there. He was reading the paper, but he looked up, smiled his charming smile, and said, ‘Well, what have you been doing with yourself, Jenny my love?’The colour whipped into Jenny’s face. She came up the long room to the hearth and stood there. She had put on a black lace dress which she had made for Christmas last year. It was too old for her, but when you have only one evening…

Surprising news that Brett Terpstra has resurrected the venerable note making app nvALT. Yes indeed, nvALT is back from the dead. True, we’ve been waiting what seems like centuries for the long-promised, upgraded and massively improved version, nvULTRA to appear, but since it isn’t yet available, at least now there’s an interim solution, a revamped nvALT. I expect almost everyone who might need a simple note-making app that plays nicely with Markdown files has already long since moved on to…

Life Resident Evil I finally got around to materializing the plan of watching Resident Evil with an old friend. We have been talking about going to watch the movie ever since it's release, but something or the other always happened. I finally kicked the ball hard this Wednesday i.e. Dusshera, and we travelled to Lulu Mall Rajajinagar for the show! It was an amazing watch! My friend liked it even more cause he had played the game before. He was initially super skeptical, but did a complete 180…

The other day, I stumbled across this visualization / article: a breakdown / reminder of who actually keeps the internet running. It’s based on that well known xkcd comic: “All modern digital infrastructure”, resting on a hastily constructed brick. Reality is even more absurd than the joke Every calendar invite that lands on time. Every […]

From the introduction by Sim Kern: Speculative fiction started pulling its punches in the 2010s. Stories were scrubbed clean of any grit. Authors sanded down sharp edges, and the safest bet was to write low-stakes, low-conflict, “cozy” fiction—a label that came to define a booming sub-genre. Don’t get me wrong—these aesthetics stemmed from legitimate critiques of genre fiction that had come before. Western scifi, fantasy, and horror stories of decades prior often did contain white supremacist,…

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Sometimes theatre can feel like it’s trying to smash you over the head with a sledgehammer when talking about particular issues. And one of the things I particularly liked about Ilford Boy at the Darmar Warehouse is that yes, it does cover really big issues like homophobia and racism, but it does it in a far more subtle way. The story is the story, and there is this underlying theme that threads through it. It’s in the little comments that people make just the way it would be…

I've documented my slowly growing breasts in this blog, and by now my right breast is noticeably fuller, but my left one has some catching up to do! But what about other changes? What are they and how am I handling them? Firstly, note that my recent blood test showed that my serum testosterone level was within the reference range, and my serum oestrogen was in the higher end of the reference range - so these changes can't all be accounted for by hormonal changes, although if my oestrogen is…