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.

These have a very soft pastry, with no real bite to it, and too sweet. The filling has a pleasant taste, but it's a bit bland and there are no distinctive or punchy flavours, and the amount of filling is a bit stingy. 2 out of 5. (Palm oil) #MincePieFest2026 #MincePieADay

Sunday Asides #120 Mercury is retrograding like SHIT this week and I've had it officially. I got pulled off some projects at my first part-time gig and had my hours cut by 75% with no explanation, finally got fully onboarded with the second part-time gig late Friday afternoon, had three job interviews this week (two of them with recruiters halfway 'round the world), and had to sit in on a deposition with a lawyer about a lawsuit I'm in. (I'm not being sued this time, thank God.) Oh, and I'm in…

It is an uncertain time for software development at the moment. A lot of companies are no longer hiring junior developers while those still employed are spending all their time prompting AI instead of writing code by hand. Even with AI writing most of the code these days, that shouldn't mean you stop learning and understanding what your code is doing. The less time you spend in your codebase the more distant you become from it. The speed that you gain from not having to write the code is soon…

The Conjuring Last Rites 2025, Michael Chaves My rating: Didn't like it I never watch these movies because they’re good, but this one failed to even have a cool premise. It’s still watchable as are all the others in this series, but if you’re in the mood for something like this, maybe rewatching some of the older ones might be better.

Next-gen feeling comic UX, love it. Arrow keys step through the panels while the music keeps going. Chapter 1 of Ponpon Mania: try it!

Two Zigbee pairing tricks I wish I’d known earlier During my migration from Philips Hue to Home Assistant’s Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration, I spent a surprising amount of time persuading smart bulbs to join the network. Most behaved, but a few were less cooperative (there’s a reason that IKEA TRÅDFRI bulbs were cheap…). I’d been using ChatGPT to help troubleshoot a particularly stubborn IKEA GU10 spotlight. It was being discovered by ZHA but repeatedly failing to complete its…

Colors of the day in Thailand — This is cool and TIL (well, yesterday thanks to Robb Knight! Arkivism — “The visual library of Alexandria.” An index of millions of images in the public domain. This is incredibly cool. Writing Month — A bare-bones way to track your writing, aka an alternative to NaNoWriMo, etc. I should have posted this last week. What Do the Next 4,000 Emoji Look Like? — Fun little article on pictographic language use. Meet the Winners of the 2026 Good Dog Photo Contest — I'm…

On 29 October, North Korea’s Lazarus Group relieved Binance of $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency in roughly 20 minutes, setting a new world record for the largest heist in human history. According to Binance’s initial security bulletin, the entry point was a classic of the genre: a single compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, which gave the attackers a path into internal service containers and hot-wallet signing infrastructure.On that exact same evening, hundreds of thousands of…

After last night’s post, I realised I was probably just getting too invested in somehow using imdb for the “who’s that actor, anyway?” command for my Emacs-based video player. Not only is it an extremely fragile setup that’s gonna stop working, but it’s also very slow — it takes half a minute to return the actor profile images. So I just implemented a tmdb API shim and then I ask it for the actor profile photo instead. tmdb doesn’t have as large a data base, but… The API is free (for…

It was my birthday this week and I ran off to Zurich to mostly walk around. I haven’t really been to the city center for a long while so I just used up almost all my energy for just walking through all the big and small streets I could find. In the evening I went to see Placebo in concert and then the day was over. Reply by email

Did you know that the “raw” in “raw photo” isn’t an acronym? It’s just “raw” as in “unprocessed”. So when someone writes it as “RAW”, they are being incorrect? I’ve been looking at the best way to archive old raw photos in my photo library, in an attempt to dig myself out of the pit of despair that is photo library management. My Sony a6500 (and the a6000 before it) save images as Sony ARW files. From the 24MP sensor, these images are usually around 24MB. As I’ll explain later, shooting with…

It’s Diwali today. I did some cleaning this morning, and the house is going to be full of lights. I haven’t lit firecrackers in a while, because I’d like a quiet sky for the animals. My internet was gone for the first half of the week, so work on Postmarked only really got going on Friday. I’ve been busy with it since, today included, and I even published my first postcard yesterday (addressed to myself!). Here’s the link: Postmarked. Work was the usual, nothing new. Apart from Postmarked, I…

For the past 14 years, I have provided open-source software support every single day. That is around half my life. To give myself a break, and to honestly just reset my brain, I’ve decided to give myself a one week break from it. That might not sound like much, or a challenge, but I’ve been noticing signs of it being a problem for a fair while now. So, this is my attempt at detoxing myself from providing support for open-source software projects. Why I felt this was necessaryWhile writing my…

The last light of day on Alaska’s Stephens Passage. The post Dusk on Stephens Passage appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Does Money Buy Happiness?by Tuesdays ChildTuesdays Child talks about how they think money = happiness. It's an interesting debate with people on both sides of the fence.Read post ➡ I found this post via this reply on Bubbles. Both are interesting takes, for different reasons. For me, money doesn't buy happiness - it buys the removal of financial stress. What actually makes you happy is the people around you and the decisions you make with whatever you have. I've kinda talked about this before…

Happy Diwali! ✨🪔 I am back home in Surat. Few sprinkles each of nostalgia, love, laughs, teamwork, chaos, confusion, teasing, relaxation and kalesh. Whisk all of them together and you would find yourself enjoying the family treat :). Life Langur gym On Sunday, climbing group decided to try out the new cool gym in town: Langur Climbing Academy. I find the gym fascinating cause of its foundations. It's jointly owned by a bunch of former Indian climbing legends with parts owned by current Indian…

Frog eyes flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says The Moving Image Archive is chock full of interesting videos. See what you can find, then share or make something new. From the site: The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can now fabricate the past, preserving verifiable history matters more than ever before. I didn’t really know what to do with…

The Walldur's Great.

Keep safe. If you're new to this metal blog of bones you can also check out the various interview projects I have going on as well as the weekly recommendation posts. And if you'd like to keep abreast of the latest, most pressing developments follow us wherever I may roam (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Bluesky, TIKTOK etc), and listen to my, I guess, active? (no) podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Apple), and to check out our amazing compilation albums. You could also possibly support my…

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Chants of Sennaar In this award-winning puzzle adventure game, play as the Traveler on a quest to reunite the Peoples of the Tower. Observe, listen, and decipher ancient languages in a fascinating universe inspired by the Myth of Babel. games language 🔖 Railpass A random view out of a train window, from around the world. art trains vis 🔖 What makes uv slow? A lot has been said about uv being fast, but not about how and when uv…

The issue with high-frequency start ("HF start") on plasma cutters is that igniting the pilot arc creates an enormous amount of electromagnetic interference which causes problems for nearby electronics, in particular tending to disconnect the USB connection to your CNC motion controller. You can solve this by talking to the motion controller over WiFi. This is my machine in its temporary location on the workbench: If you still need to acquire a plasma cutter then I obviously recommend trying to…

It's 19845, and The Doctor is in distress... but will ANYONE answer his SOS?

In a previous post I wrote about the Haverard novels by the Quaker novelist Elfrida Vipont. Here they are in order: The Lark in the Morn (1948), The Lark on the Wing (1950), The Spring of the Year (1957), Flowering Spring (1960), and The Pavilion (1969). They are hard to get! Girls Gone By, a … Continue reading The Pavilion, by Elfrida Vipont →

Evgen Avstine was a French editor, poet, publisher and writer born to Russian-Jewish parents who wrote everything from non-fiction, poetry, novels, radio dramas, screenplays and stage plays – published under his penname "Claude Aveline." The detective novel was not overlooked by Aveline. While not a prolific mystery novelist, Aveline delivered a celebrated, often reprinted classic of the French detective novel with La double mort de Frédéric Belot (The Double Death of Frédéric Belot, 1932). A…

The Long Causeway is a Medieval route that began on the eastern outskirts of Burnley and then travelled on towards Halifax. Records show its origin in Towneley Hall parkland, and continuing up to Mereclough. Today the remaining part can easily be followed by car from Mereclough village, out on to the moors into Yorkshire, ending […]

A milder day with some sunshine. Car washing. T.G.B2. making 169 to date. Some one fooling with cars last night. Police here this a.m. Did usual chores.

From the late Charlie Kirk, April 2025, following the charging of Russell Brand: Every single allegation against Russell Brand concerns events that took place twenty years ago or more. None of them existed while he was a famous actor or comedian. All of them emerged once he became a highly visible dissident on politics and Covid. Brand has been forthright about his behavior as a young man, but the idea he was a serial rapist is absurd and, more importantly, completely unprovable. This is a…

Robert introduced this fun little block challenge: Knowember. A way to get to know each other as a blogger. Such fun! So I decided to join in on it. Check out other people's posts as well. A photoThis is the weird me. Because, why not? Name or nicknameI blog under my own name: Yordi. I feel like it's a name that can be pronounced well-ish internationally. My last name less so, as it is a really Dutch name. So I just keep my blog under my first name only. and did you know that I share my first…