YPYPY The Check feat. Pauna My 11-year-old son is at a point where he is beginning to develop his own taste in music and (surprise!) it currently skews more electric. Daft Punk are his favourites, but we have also been exploring somewhat adjacent artists, including lots of French Touch, but also The Chemical Brothers. The new single from YPYPY feels like a Chemical Brothers joint straight out of their Dig Your Own Hole and Surrender era. With a big beat influenced intro, YPYPY layers drum loops…

This week’s theme for Nonfiction November is “My Year in Non-fiction”, so I dug into my StoryGraph stats a bit as a starting point, finding I’ve read 83 books that StoryGraph classes as non-fiction — so far! That does seem to include some of the poetry anthologies that I’ve read, but even so, I think it’s likely to be too many books to feature them all… so let’s talk mostly about the good ‘uns. You might also be interested in my post from last year, which took a theme-based approach. Five-star…

November 8, 2026 Friday I was at the Apple Store trading in my M2 iPad Air for the new iPad mini. While setting it up and transferring my data, I took a look around and came away with a couple of observations. The iPhone tables were busy, with plenty of people looking at the different models. At the setup table next to me, a few people were setting up their new iPhone Duo, and a couple of others were setting up a new iPad mini like mine. I also kept an eye on the MacBook table, expecting to see…

I haven't meant to be silent here on the blog; I even took my laptop to Quilt Camp yesterday, but I was so focused on my projects that I barely used it at all. By late morning on Saturday, I had finally put together the top for the Christmas quilt I'm making for my cousin's oldest child who is graduating from high school in the spring, the one who loves all things Christmas.On Friday, I finished the quilt for the king size bed. It was mostly done, but I needed to close up all the edges.I love…

You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis. – Stig Børsen Hansen Patrick Stewart gave so many amazing, iconic performances I’m marking his passing in the same way I did that of James Earl Jones and Paul Reubens: by featuring an obscure performance (called to my attention by T. Greg Doucette) you may be unfamiliar with. The links above it were provided by Nun Ya (x2); Ryan Marino; Mike Masnick; Mike Siegel; Clarissa, Jason Kuznicki, and Ryan Cooper; and Nun Ya again, in…

Great White Egret flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

A TDS3052 with a Broken-Not-Broken LCD Panel A TDS3014B with Very Broken Screen Opening the Scope Power Supply Assembly Removal Removing the Motherboard Taking Out the LCD Panel Replacing the Protective Screen Replace the LCD Panel The Result Footnotes A TDS3052 with a Broken-Not-Broken LCD Panel Last summer, Joshua tricked me into bidding $165 for a TDS3052 oscilloscope. The photos on the surplus auction site showed major screen corruption but I only noticed that after placing my bid. That…

Apple invented dark mode again!They’re calling the new feature Adaptive Dark Mode™. I’m learning that other browsers already had a similar feature. I assumed people relied on add-ons like Dark Reader (and millions do). Regardless, pushing what is effectively an accessibility option to the forefront goes a long way to help people respect it.My dark modeMy site used to have dark mode but I wasn’t happy with my colour choice and implementation. I redesigned my site back in Feb and removed it.…

Day One in Fukuoka. Before action started, media reported Shirokuma will be kyujo. He tore a ligament in his right ankle. Mitakeumi received the default win. That’s a tough break for the Number Two guy at Nishinoseki-beya. In Jonokuchi, Sunamusashi kicked the tournament off with a win. His shusshin is officially Tokyo, but he was … Continue reading Kyushu 2026: Shonichi

When I thought about this project I mostly fixated on the French Foreign Legion troops. Therefore I was excited to make a start on them although ironically I painted the fort and ten Moroccans first. Go figure (pun intended). So here we are, my first 10 of 28 FFL minis. Les Diables de Sable (The Sand Devils) Not to sound full of myself but I think I’ve painted these chaps rather well. I took my time with them and really enjoyed myself. There’s been a lot going on lately so I’ve been really…

Yesterday, I had the feeling I needed to do just another bike ride this year. It was just a bit over zero degrees outside and quite foggy, but thinking I have warm clothes, I tried it anyway. The clothes also kept me warm, but what I underestimated was how cold my feet would get, as I used the same shoes and socks as I use when it’s 30 degrees outside. With cold feet and also a bit of cold hands at the end (even though I had warm gloves, apparently not warm enough), the last 10 kilometers were…

”What the heck are you watching?” is a phrase I occasionally hear from my wife when I am watching a movie and she glances at the screen. Sometimes it is ”Ugh, that is disgusting” or ”I see you are watching porn again”. Admittedly, I am not exactly making it easy for myself as I have a thing for sleazy erotic thrillers by Brian DePalma and Paul Verhoeven, Italian giallo films or American ‘80s slashers. These are whole genres of film whose defining feature is finding aesthetically great-looking…

It can't hurt to give you a quick recap on the history of Cuddles and Dimples.The two terrifying toddlers started out as separate stories -- Cuddles first appeared in Nutty in 1981, then upon that comic's closure in 1985 he transferred over to a new title, Hoot, and served as its cover star for its brief existence. Dimples had first appeared in the Dandy in 1984, and when Hoot merged into the Dandy in late 1986 the strips were themselves combined to form Cuddles and Dimples.Initially, the boys…

9736/21655I currently have Schrodinger's Bloodstream (and he's not happy about it). Has the treatment I had in the summer worked and revitalised by white blood count and shrunk my spleen down to proper dimensions where it won't go pop? Or did the chemo fail to do its job and my racist hairy cells (it's OK, they're racist against whites, so that's not as bad) have been doing their best to keep my immune system from working? Not really in their interests as they go down with the ship if they kill…

One of the largest cemeteries in Europe, the Cimitero monumentale di Staglieno in Genoa, Italy covers more than a square kilometer. It opened in 1851 and since then has gained a reputation for its monuments to those buried there. And what monuments they are. It is a place for contemplation, for reflection on human frailty and the short-lived nature of our time on earth. Today we will let the pictures speak for themselves... Image Credit Flickr UserLatente Image Credit Flickr User Latente Image…

Addition of an Atom feed This website haa been accompanied by a RSS 2.0 feed for a very long time. RSS is important to keep the open web living and to put the user in control. Every time the site generator builds the website, it also builds the RSS feed. Now the site generator is extended with the building of an Atom feed.. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds. The Atom format was developed to clarify RSS ambiguities. Compared to RSS 2.0, the Atom format is stricter…

This somewhat strange looking specimen is a Sand Dollar and it is featured today over at our sibling site, the Ark in Space. It is a sea urchin which burrows and comes from the order Clypeasteroida – and you can see why it gets its name, as it resembles a coin. Some joke that it is the only stable dollar in the world at the moment. Humor aside, it does have one trick up its sleeve that we can only wish would apply to real money. It can clone itself – creating a perfect copy. Read more about the…

It’s now our sixth year playing Minecraft together, and we’re still on the same server and map we started back in 2020. This year we decided to terraform the inside of our hollow desert Infdev Pyramid we built from scratch over many weeks… … into a glowstone cave, with the requisite number of cakes :). We make one of these anniversary gardens each year. I shared our first and third anniversary ones here too. We haven’t explored that much more of the map over the last year, it’s mostly been…

I had an alert from my monitoring tool that the Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate for my Home Assistant OS installation had expired. The answer lay in the documentation for the Let’s Encrypt app: Certificates are not renewed automatically by the plugin. The app has to be started again to renew certificates. If the app is started again, it checks if the certificates are due for renewal. This is usually the case 30 days before the certificates’ due date. If the certificates are not due for renewal,…

Following a successful assembly of the Water Tank Sensor adapter PCB, I continued with the RT85 CTCSS module. First problem: the capacitors series I order. I overlooked the fact that they were SMD. Those are tiny! But I got away with it… Poorly. Second problem (minor): the footprint of the resistors doesn’t match “standard” resistors. It’s too small. It all went pretty well, though. Missing a socket for the µC, so that’ll justify the Jaycar run more. I’m regretting not having planned for…

Well that turned out better than I hoped - not that this method ever really disappoints - just you’re not always sure if what will happen - and with that we have a road surface…The 1mm Daler mount board was small enough in area not to worry about sealing (to slow the drying if the road paint and improve adherence if the talc) but I did paint the edges and the rails in a Humbrol 62/33 mix before hand - I didn’t want any white or shiny bits afterwards!The technique from one of Gordon Gravett’s…

Seoul has never been a city to do things by halves (or thirds or quarters for that matter), so when the Avengers come to town, it really doesn’t matter that they are there to celebrate the 2564th film in the Marvel superhero franchise (that would be Avengers: Doomsday), the denizens of the South Korean capital are going to put on a show. The 2026 Marvel Special Hangang Drone Light Show brings together a spectacular meeting of superhero mythology, together with approximately 2,000 drones. The…

This post is my contribution to BlogBlog 同樂會 - 2026 年 11 月. This month's theme is 部落格文章（與他們的產地）, hosted by JN. If you have a blog of your own, you're welcome to join in! I started making websites when I got my first computer. I was building sites on GeoCities, and I think my first few blogs were on Blogger or WordPress. I loved finding free hosting and setting up another site because I couldn't spend money on things online back then. Keeping a blog updated was harder. I've had blogs I…

I grew up without any grandparents, at least none alive or related by blood. But one of my father’s colleagues from work – a wrinkly old woman with a wobbly walk, called Maj – was retiring and had time on her hands. One morning at breakfast, he asked her if she could possibly look after his two children. She smiled and said yes. She became min Maj (my Maj). When I drew family trees in class, I included her at the top. When I was tasked with interviewing an elderly person about the Second World…

Why Dav Pilkey's Dog Man books deserve a place among the best children's books.

If you have ever tried to source photographs online, then you will have come across Getty Images. As one of the world’s leading suppliers of licensed stock photography (not to mention editorial images, video footage and other forms of visual content), you might have wondered at the processes involved by Getty itself, to source the photographs and eventually bring them online. In this video, Melanie Llewellyn of the Getty Images Hutton Archive in the UK, investigates a “forgotten” collection of…

You can decide between focusing on packaging better or creating value. This struck me when watching a video of Alex Hormozi coaching the founder of a failing theme park.1 I really like such businesses, so I was quite intrigued. Half an hour later I was rather disappointed: Never did the video touch on the actual physical elements of the theme park. Instead, it solely focused on marketing, most notably around a summer camp to be advertised. Hormozi created the arguably genius but also somewhat…

I know I am not the only one that uses LLMs, coding agents and assistants daily. With all the recurrent and heated discussions around the use of our data by big labs and inference providers, and (while slightly unrelated) the recent attack on OpenCode that reminded me that inference providers can also be hacked, opening a door for third parties to your sessions, I started reflecting on what information about me I may be leaking to all these providers through my daily use. I decided to ask…

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string and integer list manipulation. (Note that this ends today.)

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Utopia.There have been lots of pixel-art maps appearing online recently. I covered several of these projects in my recent Pixelate the World post. For today's challenge I thought it might be interesting to create a pixelated map of London – not as it is, but as it might look in an ideal world.Greater London covers approximately 1,591 square kilometres. If each zoomed-in map tile covers roughly 0.15 square kilometres, I would need in the region of 10,600 images to…