Just a small pitch for watching the early movies of a director you love. Sólo con tu pareja by Alfonso Cuarón came out in 1991. It is weird and great and if you like later movies of his, Y tu mamá también (2001) and Roma (2018) which were released 10 and 27 years after his first movie respectively, it is fun to see how he continues touching on similar themes. Cuaróns filmography: 1991 Sólo con tu pareja 1995 A Little Princess 1998 Great Expectations 2001 Y tu mamá también 2004 Harry Potter and…
I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to record Modern Rock.Dunedin is a city in an amphitheater of hills and harbour. It's compact, set close to…
8611/21530Tomorrow I resume my chemo treatment, so today I made the most of having some energy and an appetite and did housework, gardening, mended a loose bit on the shed and even attempted to paint the kitchen ceiling which was slightly damaged by a leak from the bathroom above. I think I have just felt so useless for the last fortnight that I wanted to do something to contribute and after so much enforced lethargy it just felt amazing to be doing anything.
Time for code and coffee! Let’s go!
Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I'm putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don't quite fit! This week I learned about five islands you cannot visit - and why they are forbidden. 5 Isolated Islands That Are Strictly Forbidden (And Why)Some islands are off-limits for a reason. From deadly snakes to protected Indigenous territory, here are five places you’re not allowed to visit. Get better at work. Every Week. One…
Continuing our look at the final four Canons of the proceedings of the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council, we come to Canon 68, which wanted to make sure everyone knew who a Jew (or Muslim) was, so they could avoid them if desired.In some provinces a difference in dress distinguishes the Jews or Saracens [Muslims] from the Christians, but in certain others such a confusion has grown up that they cannot be distinguished by any difference. Thus it happens at times that through error Christians have…
Green whines at the nest on Friday 26 June 2026 (photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh) 28 June 2026 On Friday one of this year’s juvenile peregrines burst into the Cathedral of Learning nest and complained loudly that her parents should feed her “Right Now!” though she’s old enough to hunt on her own. Ecco was in the nestbox, about to bow — maybe Carla was going to join him? — but we’ll never know because “Green” was so demanding that she chased Ecco away. Green…
Costing honey as if bees were paid Australian minimum wage. A fair jar runs about AUD$12 million; AUD$10M of that is the hive's fixed OPEX.
The Maybe-One War A Hundred Years Plus More Civility Labor Pains No Asterisks Getting to the Point Siege Engines Leading the Witness Corporatocracy And Guns, Too And Still More Today Reforms Get It Together How (Not) To I sometimes get called an optimist, especially when talking about politics in the United States. For example, looking at the rage against DEI, protests, the attacks on transgender folks, the attempts to dismantle a pluralistic democracy, and much more, I see desperation on the…
I’ve revised my “Memory is an Otherworld” post and added audio narration. I may start doing this now and then. Nothing improves a piece of writing like a rural accent with authentically dropped g’s. 😂
The weather is… infuriatingly tropical, but tolerable (we’re used to the heat this time of year, but the dampness is relatively new), and shifting all my morning meetings to my standing desk has markedly improved (but not fully healed) my back, so it was a relatively OK week. Other than it being the last fiscal month at work, that is–my thresholds for patience have become somewhat elastic over the years, but it’s still a busy part of the year. That, and the ongoing industry madness pushed me…
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…
