In their walknotes last week, DW ended with: Post, before you become a person that doesn’t post. …and, I realised I have once again become a "person that doesn't post". Future-me always gets really annoyed with past-me when that happens, so current-me is going to try and fix that. Thanks for the kick DW So, in no particular order, this is some stuff that's been happening: I moved off 1Password because of their whole supporting fascists thing. Currently looking to move off Digital Ocean, again…

Autograph Hound Saturday yet again! Today Paul Dobish provides the eye candy for John Hancock fans with a couple of books from his collection signed by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. — otherwise known as E. E. “Doc” Smith. Hugely popular in his day, one of the pioneers of pulp science fiction, an avatar for the likes of Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to follow, his achievement currently represented by the cinematic oeuvre of George Lucas — in short, he did space opera. And how. Top image, Smith’s…

Ghost Rider (detail, 1973) by Bruce Pennington. • Steven Heller’s font of the month is Dez Bollardian. My own font of the month is Nosferatu, a design by Sarah Salome Deletain and Jules Durand loosely inspired by the lettering on the German intertitle cards from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens. • The week in photography: Winners of the Nikon 2026 Microphotography Competition; Winners and finalists of the American Meteorological Society 2026 Photo Contest; The Lion Nebula as…

My comment on Is Teams really all that bad? – LinkedIn “When async chat tools work, they’re like a conference room where the dev team works through an outage. There’s a history of what’s been said. Specialists and management can step in and observe, without interrupting. Teams takes a more DM-like approach that silos communication. In high-stakes situations, it feels like you’re fighting the issue and the tool.” I’d caveat that my Teams experience all relates to fully-remote work.

It seems my misanthropy is contagious. I turned into the neighborhood to find the street lined with cars. Apparently, it’s the day of the Fall Festival, when people swarm the park to enjoy vacuous small talk and sketchy food safety standards. My first reaction was a quiet sigh and a shake of my head as I slowed to navigate the crowds. To my surprise, my usually outgoing and happy son echoed me from the backseat. I didn’t say anything, but it made me realize that I must exude this attitude like…

Today's tea was a gushu pu'er from Zheng Jia Liang Zi, Yiwu. Its wild character originating from old tea trees growing in mixed forests, the taste slowly rounding out throughout the many steeps. It's the first time brewing from this 100g mini-cake I got from Zürich back in May this year. All while listening to records – the new Hermanos Gutiérrez album, BADBADNOTGOOD's III, and coming back to my old records with Poppy Ackroyd's Escapement and Hidden Orchestra's Archipelago. At the same time,…

The Guardian recently reported that around 50000 people died because of the extreme heat in the summer of 2026. The article says that researchers estimate that the effects of anthropogenic climate change were largely to blame for about two-thirds of those deaths. At the millennium, that proportion was about two-fifths, or 40 percent. Hungary, Italy, and Malta experienced the highest heat-death rates, while Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK recorded the largest numbers of deaths. Naples…

When an encounter or scene takes place the initial disposition of the NPCs or Creatures can largely influence the way the players approach the situation. As the referee it is sometimes obvious what the starting disposition is. I like to have a little uncertainty in my game, it keeps me on my toes and can give me some juice on how to play it out. There are various ways you can do it, here are some ideas. Initial PositionThe simplest way to determine starting position is roll a single dice low is…

The Safari web browser has a longstanding annoying misfeature: it announces “Reader Available” and “Translation Available” in the address bar, whether you like it or not, with no way I know of to stop that madness. This behavior is bad on Mac, worse on iPhone. Below is a screen recording of Safari on Mac. If you watch the screen recording frame by frame, you can see that the page URL appears for a fraction of a second after the link is clicked, but then the URL is replaced by “Reader Available”…

It’s a cool 70 degrees Fahrenheit here in southern Arizona today. The sun is shining brightly, with puffy clouds hanging out just over the mountain peaks. I opted to not go for a hike this morning but instead enjoy a lovely walk around the neighborhood. I ended up walking just over three miles. The landscape at this time of year makes it a little more delightful. I’m happy our HOA focuses on keeping things look like the natural desert.

The theme for this year’s MileHiCon is steampunk and mad scientists, and as one of the perks of being a guest of honor, I got my own mad scientist lab coat, with my name thoughtfully added to the back (along with a nicely steampunk rocket). I quite like it. It looks good on me. I think everyone will be wearing them soon. — JS

Red leaves. 🍂

Why do I think Heuro Train's plans to run Amsterdam - Paris in 2030 are bullshit? Because I can see no way to think they can get any trains to run by then. An important building block for a route from today to running in 2030 is missing.Why do I think Nox have a better chance? Because I can at least see what all the building blocks are to be able to run, although I admit that the chances some of the pieces fall into place are not 100% certain.And this, while I have not articulated it this way…

The Job is Knowing When to Be Deterministic & When to Be Probabilistic This week, I gave a short talk at AGNTCon titled, “Context Fails & Fixes,” that functioned as a sort of “State of Context Engineering.” How did context engineering emerge, where has it gone, and where might it go in the future? As model makers target new capabilities, they inadvertently create challenges we, as users and harness builders, must overcome. Below are the slides and a lightly edited transcript. As always, shoot…

The campground closes tomorrow… but I left yesterday. Normally I leave with a sense of excitement, ready to get back on the road - but this year it’s different. And it doesn't feel like a whole six months have passed since I got here. Has my routine become mundane to me? Is it one of those age-related things that I’ve been blaming things on lately? It’s kinda becoming my “go-to” excuse. 🙃 Or just maybe… it’s because this summer was like no other in the history of my nomadic life! This summer…

We live right at the mouth of Rock Canyon. Technically the entire canyon is in the city of Provo, Utah. During the past week, we have had terrific storms and extensive flooding throughout Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. We did get some rain in Provo, but not enough to cause any flooding. However, we did see that there was a substantial rockfall in the Provo Canyon next to Bridal Veil Falls. This is an actual photo of the canyon and the clouds. However, the foreground was edited by Google Gemini.

(LLMs were used to help organize and translate this post) Why: the failure I can't see (Related posts: My Personal Information System , Personal Information System Implementation ) A backup that silently stopped working is worse than no backup, because I only find out when I need it. My goal at home is simple to state: preserve my information. That means identification and health documents, contracts and invoices, professional work, about 750 GB of photographs and 182 GB of lossless music. The…

Today is the R.U.S.H. tournament! I'm excited, and probably gonna boot up a bit before check in to warm up a bit! I am gonna try and stream my perspective, so if you wanna watch me play I'll be streaming at my Twitch in about an hour from now! (2pm EST) Wish me luck!

Bloc Party Silent Alarm (Japanese Edition)Get It At DiscogsMuch more polished, serious, and straight-ahead than their initial EPs suggested, Silent Alarm reveals Bloc Party as a band equally informed by taut art-punk and the grand gestures and earnestness of groups like Coldplay and U2. Though they're not quite as stadium-sized expansive as either of those two bands (yet), Bloc Party sound a lot more comfortable making proclamations like "Positive Tension"'s "Something glorious is about to…

Joyride is my zinething but as a blog post. I'm trying it out. If you're on RSS I cordially invite you to take a look at the page! Joy in the winterIt's easy for me to be joyful in the spring and summer. It is harder to find joy in the grey and the rain. So I have to choose to. Try that bit harder. I try to think, how is this great? What are the advantages, or at least the silver lining here? How can I make it joyful? A lot of people love the autumn and winter. They like the blankets, candles,…

An iconic Ogden Pleissner. Grouse camp was mid week. It was good to get out. It is hard to believe we have been doing it for 40 years.

I like games that have a soul. I like games made by a small group of creatives which can put their own ideas without feeling too limited. I don't see the point in the "industry", unless your point is wasting your life in front of a screen. So why oh why do people who share this view get so angry when studio xyz gets shut down or dissolves? "they could have made this and that, what a pity! they had franchise potential, I was waiting for a sequel!" Why not let creatives form groups, make the…

Melting wax to pour some candles. I’ve made over a thousand candles at this point but because we only do it once a year I always feel like I have no idea what I’m doing when we start pouring. Good thing I learned to keep good notes with weights! Let the candle making begin!

Generated by ChatGPT Dec. 2025 Alex Berenson is a one-time N.Y. Times reporter whose life appears to have taken an unfortunate turn in the wake of MAGA and COVID. According to his Wikipedia entry: During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccines. He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown. Once the COVID-19 vaccines became available, he spread misinformation about the…

Es ist nicht selten so, dass wenn mich etwas begeistert, es mich auch gleich richtig derbe begeistert. Wismar begeistert mich auf eben diese Art! Wismar ist Teil zwei unseres kleinen Ostsee-Urlaubs—nach drei Tagen in Nienhagen bei meinen Eltern mit Besuchen in Warnemünde und Bad Doberan. Drei Nächte sind wir hier und obwohl das Wetter nordisch-trüb ist, hat sich Wismar bei einem nächtlichen Spaziergang an unserem Ankunftstag von seiner besten Seite gezeigt. Wismar ist wunderschön! Nicht…

Here are the Vim forks I know about: Neovim: “a Vim-based text editor engineered for extensibility and usability, to encourage new applications and contributions.” Vim Classic: “a stable, long-term support fork of the ubiquitous text editor, maintained without the assistance of generative AI tools.” EVi: “a hard-fork of Vim v9.1.0 (Jan 2024) before AI was used in the project.” MacVim: “a macOS version of the Vim text editor, providing a graphical user interface for Vim, while tightly…

Michael O. Rabin 1931-2026 There is a lot of academic activity in the week of October 25-29, 2026, and on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 we have the Israeli general elections. Let me encourage all my Israeli friends and readers to vote! Here is a partial list of activities. (Please add more in comments, or private emails.) Mathematics Action now (dynamics); October 25-26 Hebrew University. Highlights in Probability, October 25–28 Hebrew University. Model theory, Oct. 25-26, Technion. Convexity &…

After flipping to my own custom theme for my blog I was able to ship something I’ve wanted for a very long time: all of my personal sites are now connected with a navigation header at the very top of the page. For the first time it is easy to jump from site to site!

An affirmation spotted on a sidewalk in Downtown McKinney, Texas. The post That’s Why Our Hearts Have Beats appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.