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…

And so, my fellow programmers: ask not what your compiler can do for you—ask what you can do for your compiler. — John F. Kennedy A friend and I were talking about the (somewhat) new consuming and borrowing keywords in Swift, which led to the question “what’s the point, can’t the compiler just work it out for me?” which I think is worth some interrogation. When I used to teach programming at university, one of the common pieces of confusion stemmed from strong typing. For someone who is new to…

A song from a TV show that you like. There is one song that features in the best TV show ever made (The West Wing) but, for the most part, it’s free of songs. The song used —New York Minute by Don Henley— is just on the wrong side of 80s twee for me, a little too ballad-lite to be memorable. My current favourite TV show does have a great song, written specifically for it by Sir Mick Jagger, and features the slim-hipped, big lipped drawl over a wonderfully dark, kitsch sound. I originally…

Linux 7.3 (released 2026-10-18) introduces the following Landlock features: LANDLOCK_RESTRICT_SELF_NO_NEW_PRIVS flag for landlock_self_restrict(2). With this flag, you can skip the explicit prctl(2) syscall with PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS, and Landlock will set up that prerequisite as part of the same syscall. This feature was built by Justin Suess. Landlock tracepoints define stable interfaces for tracing Landlock (and installing eBPF hooks). Mickaël Salaün’s landlock-observability library offers a…

Today, we're going back to 2019 to discuss a project I really liked, as well as a few more thoughts on certain aspects of the Setouchi Triennale.As you may have guessed, Bonsai: Deepening Roots revolved around bonsai. It was organized and managed by Setouchi Cogeiz and Masashi Hirao.Setouchi Cogeiz is (was?) a group of local designers. I wonder if it's a "was" because their website doesn't seem to have been updated since around 2022.Masashi Hirao is a "young" local bonsai master whose work…

Recently, someone rebuilt a famous and expensive piece of software with an AI agent, and published it for free. Thousands of people installed it. It made a lot of noise, and kicked off a whole “Reverse-Engineer-Everything” trend. Almost no one read the source. The author had not written a line of it either. There was no one left to ask. More than five years ago, I wrote a blog post called Do you trust your FOSS?. The idea was simple, and I still stand by it: a free licence does not mean someone…

I had a thought, what if I could read things AI creates offline and on my distraction free reMarkable tablet? And, what if I could get Amp to send docs to reMarkable, I annotate or scribble on them and then Amp updates its own state based on that? We could collaboratively iterate. Wouldn’t that be insanely useful when an LLM creates a PDF which is good but has some junk in it you don’t want and instead of a back and forth you just want to draw the changes. Move section from here to here. Use…

One week at number one on 13th August 1988I’m pondering this track while walking the dog and grabbing a drink at the local cafe – something I often do when drafting new blog entries – when, serendipity abound, I realise that the young women on the counter are listening to a seventies disco compilation. Sadly, this isn’t the kind of compilation that reflects a wide spread of the dancefloor hits of the era, but a kind of sanitised, Heart FM “disco super smashes” effort. So while I’m hanging…

Personal notes for week 43 of 2026

A key focal for me during this trip was Suilven. I’ve been obsessed with this mountain ever since I first laid eyes on it over a decade ago. On this particular day, we were up bright and early on the premise of heading all the way to Inverkirkaig for hiking to the Falls of Kirkaig. 2–3 hours and lots of mud later, we abandoned the hike without seeing the falls; with all the rain, the “path” had degenerated into a boggy quagmire.

Porting rhine into nixpkgs abmurrow Sun, 25 Oct 2026 - 20:46

original. Transcribed here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm

After yesterday’s lament you’d be forgiven in being surprised at seeing more Defiance here this morning. I took a sideways step and ticked off something else rather than progressing that road surface…Yet more ‘in progress’ shots, perhaps these warts and all reflections may encourage you on your own project. Despite various family commitments I managed an hour or so of quiet time and decided I would add the basic lighting inside the unloading shed - using a method I’d found worked nicely on both…

Every year, I manage to miss the blooming heather here in Eindhoven. This time, we did go on time in August and it was quite amazing to see. The light conditions were not the best, and I did not put a lot of effort into it, so the photos are not fantastic. But I thought it’d be nice to share anyways! 💬 Reply via e-mail | 📖 Sign my guestbook

A couple of days ago, I saw a phone notification from the Kompas app. Kompas is one of the oldest, most respected, and biggest media in Indonesia, that was founded back in 1965. I started subscribing to them after my friend, Ario, mentioned about their promo on his Threads. Despite I didn’t get the promo due to my location (outside Indonesia), I was, and still is, pretty happy with the subscription. My goal is to make sure I have my information sources from the media, and Kompas is one of the…

Here are some snapshots of what I saw when I was walking around Bugis this morning… ~ An Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantry for automatic collection of road toll. These gantry are currently being phased out, and replaced with a system that relies on satellites. Also, if you live in Singapore, you need to learn a lot of acronyms and initialisms. ~ Looking up at a public housing apartment block… or, as we call it here, an HDB. ~ It is a bit 'hazy' today, as the wildfires at neighboring…

Photo: © Stan B.It's the stress, I tell ya! Life is hard enough without the added, abject insanity thrust upon us daily from the duplicitous dictates and machinations of: a terminally narcissistic, corrupt to the core fascist suffering from dementia. The midterms will help alleviate the pain somewhat- but in the long run, it will only irritate he who fulminates- only serving to guarantee increased gas output...

Saturdays at SPIEL are always a bit weird for the enthusiastic board gamer that’s deep in the hobby. Before SPIEL regularly sold out all days and back when it was more “just come and game something” convention, Saturday was always the most crowded day due to all the families and people who hadn’t been able to get off work. So there is a tradition for people to game late / party on Friday and then just sleep in on Saturday or not go to the Messe halls at all. Someone for example told me their…

During the Covid pandemic, Galician Group of Origami (GGO), the people responsible for the Outdoor Origami Meeting (Plener Origami), published a book of origami instructions and made it available as a free PDF download. The book, Stay at Home and Fold Origami, contains 29 models by Polish origami designers. The original website is no longer maintained, so with permission of the publisher, I’m now making the PDF available for download from my website. You can find the file here: PDF Enjoy! Model…

Yet another spectacular week of walking in the woods in October. Are you sick of these posts yet? I hope not. More mushrooms discovered. Also, I discovered who has been chewing on some of the mushrooms we discovered. Banana slug aka mushroom muncher! Everybody’s gotta eat, amiright? A rare capture of Bowser standing still AND facing me without me dangling a treat over his head. This is my more usual view . This tree stood out like a candle in a dark room. Long shadows in the background. Bowser…

It's Snoozle Time! The exclamation mark hopefully makes this all more exciting than it actually is. First up is this scan from September, 1960. I guess the photo was taken from the Monorail? There was nothing else (other than the Skyway, which is to our left) that was elevated like that. It captures a sort of general view of Fantasyland, with parts of various attractions peeking up above the trees, but nothing that serves as a "main subject". It's not such a bad picture, really, just sort of…

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Quick bits 4 PHP, despite all its flaws, remains something I’ll gladly use. I even recently updated my contact form with some additional spam protection! The web feed for my week­notes now has an XSL stylesheet, so that it no longer renders as raw XML. It always felt jarring to link to an XML file with no style. The stylesheet now shows a bit of information about what to actually do with that file. Sadly, XSLT support is being removed from browsers, so this might not last for much longer. I…

The 1963 Bulletin of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art noted a little-known London inventor, George Remington, took out a 14-year patent on a globe table in Dec 1807. A few months later, the rights to produce his invention were bought by cabinet makers Morgan and Sanders Co.English globe writing desk, c1810, Morgan & Sanders.This company had produced a working model of Remington's patent by 1809, when their first article appeared in the Ackermann's monthly Repository of Arts, Literature,…