Meet Fred and Ethel (named by my adorable wife). You should get one of these feeders that sticks to your window. It’s wonderful to be able to see birds within two feet of my chair. The marking you see on the window are flowers drawn by Rachel to make sure the birds don’t bonk their noggins.
For most Android users, downloading an app begins and ends with the Play Store. But beyond Google's storefront is a thriving community of developers building software with a different philosophy: one centered around transparency, privacy, user freedom and open collaboration. It's a world where applications are shared because someone wanted to solve a problem, not because they were chasing downloads or advertising revenue, and nowhere is that spirit more evident than on 'F-Droid'.One developer…
While I’m playing with that more-than-hundred-year-old management book…how to reproduce drawings: It occurs to me that most people reading this need one or more terms translated or explained: In addition to “drafter,” there used to be a job called “tracer.” Tracers copied pencil drawings or sketches into ink. That was pretty much gone by the time I started work in 1987, but some people in the office still referred to drawings as “tracings.” What everyone, including me, calls “blueprinting” is…
This is Part 4 of The Great Balkans Road Trip. If you’re new to the series you can start from the beginning here. I’m doing a circular tour of the Balkans with a solo travel company called Just You, starting in Romania, travelling through Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia, ending up back in Romania two weeks later. Today, we’re in Sofia. Are you a bean chiller or a fork prodder? Now you may recall from Day 3 that there was a Bulgarian stand-off in the Astoria Grand Hotel restaurant…
Sunday Asides #101 The Obamas have been outside lately with the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago this past Juneteenth weekend, and I gotta say, seeing them and hearing them all over the place lately has felt really, really good. I read (and watched!) their cover story interview with Janine Rubenstein in People and damn...I miss them. I think a LOT of people miss them. The grace. The comfort. The stability and balance and thoughtfulness they both exude are something this…
I’m obsessed with coffee. I‘ve been since I was a teenager. I‘m sure part of it has to do with good memories, but there aren‘t many bad things in life that a good cup of coffee can‘t fix.
Here are some informative paragraphs from the placemats at Tutti Santi, home of “legendary Italian pizza” in Kielce, Poland. Włosaka pizza to setki lat historii. Na to, jak smakuje, ma wpływ jakość produktów, ale tez wiele lat poszukiwan, odkryc i zaangażowania ludzi, dla których pizza stała się życiową pasją. Zamów swoją ulubioną pizzę i rozsmakuj się w tej wyjątkowej historii. Italian pizza embodies centuries of history. Its taste is shaped not only by the quality of the ingredients but also…
While the rest of the country has been sweltering in a heat wave, here, in Edinburgh, we have had warm sun alternating with heavy rain. Good for the garden if a little tricky for the gardener. As a result everything is growing fast. We had our first peas: the beautiful and tasty blauwschocker. Just a taste but there are plenty more to come. The garden flowers are at their midsummer best, with this midsummer madness round the pond bringing me joy every time I look out of the patio doors. In…
Four weeks ago, this series started with a simple claim: consistency compounds. Then we looked at what it takes to keep going when motivation disappears, the difference between presence and performance, and why showing up for yourself is the foundation that makes everything else work.All of those posts were about choices. This one is about what those choices are building, right now, whether you're thinking about it or not.The Mirror QuestionIf someone who doesn't know you personally were to…
[Nicked from a later comment to the previous one.] Other OSes I've used with no CLI -- Psion EPOC 16 (x86, Series 3); EPOC 32 (Arm, Series 5); Symbian; PalmOS; NewtonOS; and on the desktop, Atari TOS/GEM. PalmOS is not so much from MacOS as indirectly from another Apple product: the Newton, which was architecturally totally different (a native Arm OS with no CLI and no filesystem either). Newton OS 1.x could only read cursive: joined-up long hand written script, and it had to learn yours first…
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Like one, that on a lonesome roadDoth walk in fear and dread,And having once turned round walks on,And turns no more his head;Because he knows, a frightful fiendDoth close behind him tread.Samuel Taylor Coleridge“The Rime of The Ancient Mariner”Bookended by Tom Baker's recitation of the above extract from Coleridge's masterpiece this fifth series episode of the ITV series 'Dramarama' with it's folk horror aura would have been well at home in it's seminal 'Spooky' series.Young Peter Ibbotson is…
Heat wave daydream time: everything’s melting, including my brain, and there’s very little I can do to conjure blog ideas when I’m sitting in my knickers sweating soup. But yesterday just as I lay down in bed, I had a very powerful horny image. Instead of trying to write that into a proper blog post, […] The post Roughly lubing me up appeared first on Girl on the Net.
I’m in the market for an air conditioning unit. With temperatures currently hitting heatwave conditions in the UK and much of Western Europe, I think everyone is in the market for an air conditioning unit. The suppliers of domestic air con are not really plentiful in my neck of the woods. Why would they be? This is England. There is (was) not much of a market here. Looking around for a unit with installation to supply two floors is just plain stupidly expensive. Everything in England is…
I literally had to stop what I was doing and write about this immediately. This is a nerdy, programming language thing, but it’s a thing that made me smile and filled me with hope. I first heard about the Zig Programming Language years ago. But I’m a very cautious adopter of new tech so it just sat there as “a thing that exists”. This week, though, I came across this YouTube interview with the creator of Zig. And I had to say some things about it. This guy is smart, considered, articulate and…
In 2025, his book sales dropped by 46%. That’s what Tim Ferriss discovered when he looked at his spreadsheets. The smoking gun: ChatGPT’s release around 2022, when his sales started to decrease. And that’s the landscape for a best-selling author. Now imagine being a mere mortal without Tim’s reach. Here are some of the changes Tim is making—and how I’m stealing them: Rely on personal stories “For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the…
Graffiti on a hopper car spotted near Downtown McKinney, Texas. The post Graffiti Hopper appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.
One of my friends led me by the hand through the crowd That sounds like an insignificant detail but it really wasn't It was Nightmass at Dark Mofo and I was there with two friends (S and F) who are married to each other Dark Mofo is a winter arts and music festival in Tasmania, Australia Nightmass is one of it's major events. A mix of clubs, performance art and strangeness as you go from one interconnected building to another just exploring the rooms Images/videos included in this post are from…
It has been a privilege for me to be a part of the 25th anniversary of the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (NAFCo) which finishes today in Aberdeen. Musicians, dancers and academics from all over the world have descended on our little city to celebrate, perform and discuss traditional fiddle music and dance. I signed up as a volunteer for the event and helped to organise the busking trail (also called popup performances) on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I selected the venues, found wet…
There’s a roadside plant in Britain that you may have seen. It looks like a massive dandelion seed head. It’s known as common goat’s ... Continue The post The Wild Root Chefs Don’t Know appeared first on Robin Harford from Eatweeds.
My partner took me to a Pickleball Open play event. Being a beginner, I am grateful that I got a chance to play against many different types of players. In between games, I had a chat with a gentleman who played really well. During our conversation, I learned that he started playing 1.5 years ago, but he plays 8 times a week. Through loads of practice and resilience, he is one of the better players within the group. This is a profound conversation. Most of life's success is about putting in the…
Various examples of thumb loop transfers in the string figure literature.
In Xanadu Next did Nihon Falcom a pleasure dome erect.
Here are a few interesting things I came across this week. Tasted Whittaker's Nelson Pear and Manuka Honey chocolate for the first time. Amazing. Krish Ashok's video on how Omega-3 supplements are probably useless? I did a full blood test few months ago and my cholesterol is a bit high. I was hoping these supplements make it a little better.. I guess not. I will continue my climb back up the running ladder and fibermaxxing. Last week, I saw Thermal and a Quarter live at the Humming Tree. The…
Up before dawn to take care of chores - stow sleeping gear, break down the boom tent, get rid of trash, clean up the boat. I plug in a couple battery packs for a stealth charge on the patio of the Oriental Marina and Inn. Walking back to SPARTINA, I hear my name called out from the porch at The Bean. It is Keith, a longtime friend and editor of TownDock.net. I head over to say hello, sit down and enjoy a blueberry muffin and iced tea.Finishing breakfast I notice cars showing up and people…
I'm writing this on Sunday morning from deck 8 on the Fred Olsen Borealis. It's sunny with a breeze but very pleasant. We are in sight of land in waking hours for the first time since we lost sight of the Isle of Wight on Friday. This means we've had no internet connection - and I'm not paying the ransom for the ship's WiFi (which seems to be pretty slow anyway). We can just see the north of Scotland, somewhere near John O' Groats. There's a couple of fishing boats and the ever present wind…
They were having a pancake and sushi luncheon. I was not familiar with Ibrahim’s work, but I quite liked this piece Jesse Walker selected to accompany his obituary. The other links above the video were provided by IncarcerNation, Nun Ya, Mike Siegel, T. Greg Doucette, Radley Balko, Missy Mariposa, and IncarcerNation again, in that order. No, your reason is not an exception. Dr. Lilly never considered this possibility. R.I.P. Abdullah Ibrahim and Daveigh Chase. Cops are a menace to everyone in…
There’s long been a disconnect between concerns about the massive impact of AI data centres on electricity demand and claims by Sam Altman and others that the impact is really modest. Ed Zitron recently posted a summary of OpenAI’s 2025 accounts which helps to clarify things a bit. In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to…
