Tuesday 30th June 2026 Halfway through 2026 and time for another month end round up of miscellany spotted on my travels during the last few weeks. Its very first Nationalised journey And first up is the irony of spotting the very first GBR branded Southern Class 387 train calling at Hassocks station on the very first weekday morning of the new nationalised regime of the former Govia Thameslink Railway on Monday 1st June ….. on the 08:06 Brighton to Victoria which is….. a Gatwick Express…
There is a small voice inside of me that always tells me, “You’re too old to start something new.” In his book Three Mile an Hour God, Kosuke Koyama says, “When I think about time, I have no other choice than to be humble.” Bob Dylan said something interesting while pontificating on his 80th birthday. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but it was something to the effect of: time moves on, but we stand still. To me, that really says that we’re all passengers here, and we get to react…
A simplified list of rules I try to live by. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others.
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has a model for ridership estimation for public transit lines, called STOPS. It’s designed to be simplified enough that transit agencies can compute rough projections with it without having a large permanent in-house team dedicated to it (the MTA has a team of about 12). At the Transit Costs Project, we’ve taken to using it to do estimates for potential extensions under various assumptions on speed, frequency, and service pattern. For example, the…
A practical guide to OWASP A05:2025 Injection. Learn how SQL, command, and other injection flaws really work, and how to stop them for good with parameterized queries and safe APIs in Python.
A practical guide to OWASP A04:2025 Cryptographic Failures. Learn the real-world mistakes - weak password hashing, plaintext data, bad randomness, hardcoded keys - and how to fix them with secure Python.
A practical guide to OWASP A03:2025 Software Supply Chain Failures. Learn why it's a brand-new Top 10 category, real attacks from xz to dependency confusion, and how to lock down your dependencies and CI/CD pipeline.
Virtually every fighting game appearing in arcades in the 1990s brought together martial artists from around the world to engage in one-on-one combat. Samurai Shodown did this as well, but it stood apart as a result of two crucial differences. For one, it had each fighter bring a weapon into battle, and for another, it was the rare period piece fighting game, with the ten playable characters convening in Edo-era Japan specifically in the spring and summer of 1788. In the background of the…
Virtually every fighting game in the 1990s brought together martial artists from around the world to engage in one-on-one combat. Samurai Shodown did this as well, but it stood apart as a result of two crucial differences. For one, it had each fighter bring a weapon into battle, and for another, it was the rare period piece fighting game, with the ten playable characters convening in Edo-era Japan over the course of the spring and summer of 1788. In the background of the tournament, however,…
It's kind of interesting to see 7 Dogs hit American theaters a week after Unidentified; they've got very little in common aside from having "Saudi Arabia" as the first country listed under "Country of Origin" on IMDB, and sort of represent the two poles of a film industry, especially one that is very new: Unidentified is almost all homegrown talent, topical, and has a genuine sense of place (
Jun 0407:36 PMSo, I accidently read news about the news today and it began to click in my mind. I suddenly realized the old guard of social media VC deal flow underbelly are now considered the media heirs apparent mouthpieces and proxies where of those that were, at best, journalism adjacent have somehow mysteriously ascended into media leadership roles that I did not forsee… as somehow the patina or simulacrum of credentials is no longer of profound importance… unless this is all a simulation…
Swedish death cleaning is about discarding possessions before you die as a kindness. But in the smaller universe of personally meaningful objects, the ones you leave behind will be the last story you tell. And you shape that narrative by what you keep and throw away. If you’ve ever had to go through a late loved one’s physical possessions, you sometimes discover things they kept that didn’t fit the image you had of them. You wish you could ask them why they kept those things, and what they…
LGB couplings, Accucraft choppers, both incompatible with each other. The solution? A length of bath plug chain. Small scalers won't be impressed with the lack of fidelity of this setup, but outdoors, we are just happy that it works, and we can get on with running trains. I do love a cheap and simple solution.
I ran, as mentioned in the previous post, and the good news is the surgery didn’t seem to have any effect. After 42 days off, I was slow, but that’s because I took 42 days off. I also had a respectable sleep last night. These things please me. Here is a cat looking pleased.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission: Between November 2023 and August 2025, Amazon AU’s Prime contracts with more than one million annual subscribers contained what the ACCC alleges were five unfair contract terms that allowed it to unilaterally make negative changes during the contract period without offering subscribers a remedy. It is also alleged that Amazon AU later relied on one or more of these unfair terms when it introduced ads to Prime Video in Australia in July 2024.…
Sure, there may be a few tense minutes while the little rascal gets trapped between the sliding doors, but if you’re patient he’ll eventually find his way outside and you can rest feeling a little less murderery. AWESOME! All-new awesome things posted daily here: Photo from: here The post #648 Shooing a fly outside without having to kill it appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.
Legions is a 2-player card game set in the world of Abyss. There are five regions between the two players, and you play cards to compete for dominance in each of these regions. There are two ways you can win. If you manage to capture five banners, you win immediately. Banners only appear on some cards, and it is not easy to achieve this victory condition. If no one achieves this by the
Byron Kaye, Reuters: Australia’s prime minister vowed on Friday to bullet-proof laws supporting a social media ban for under-16s as the government prepares legal action against platforms amid a steady stream of evidence that the ban has had little impact on teen use. […] He did not give further details about what steps the government would take and the regulator declined to comment. The details matter. In general, though, anything that makes age gating more effective must presumably make…
Most of my brain has been absorbed by three dynasty fantasy basketball drafts which have been happening more or less simultaneously since Sunday. This means that I have been in conversations with no less than 20 other managers somewhat regularly since Sunday, which should be interpreted as "I desperately need to get the fuck away from my computer." But before I do, I feel like sharing a doin' that's, uh, transpired. After spending a year on Bear, I took the plunge I had been thinking about…
Tags: #nature #dispatchesAli and I went for a hike yesterday, the first time for her in years. We went along with friends on their usual weekend route. I had never been into Almaden Quicksilver park from the east before, the New Almaden town side. It used to be a mine, which is what “Almaden” means and is named for, a famous mine in Spain since antiquity. The hike is up a road grade, wide and even and well maintained. Mountain bikers (several passed us) and horses (didn’t see any) can use it…
Primeiramente: não sou hater. Adoro a Copa do Mundo, assisto ao máximo de partidas que consigo e torço. Mas duas coisas realmente me irritam nesse copa.1. Cobrar escanteio na borda externa da linhaGostaria de saber qual o ganho de eficiência nisso. Eu não vejo motivo. Foto IFAB 2. Tocar a bola na zaga como se não houvesse contra ataqueIsso me faz arrancar os cabelos. Eu entendo que às vezes é necessário recuar a bola, mas honestamente é triste ver esses caras se arriscando no campo de defesa…
I was young. I wanted something very badly and I was afraid that if I took my eye off it, I wouldn’t have it. And I was right. There was no other way to do it. And it meant choosing it over you. But it was always meant to be temporary.Just until I got what I wanted...But then I had to keep it. I am reminded of the other recent George Clooney vehicle, Wolfs: this is self-indulgent in one dimension, and its merits are almost entirely carried by the efforts of Sandler and Clooney, both of whom…
Got married to Ludovica in Rome. The week around it was full of friends, family, aperitivi, airport runs, and the particular relief of seeing everyone happily mix together. Kept turning the Rome studio into a real working space: installed the light fixtures, added a proper espresso machine, built out more storage, and started turning the storage room into a 3D-printing room. Spent a weekend in Abruzzo, attended another wedding, and had a long seafood lunch on a trabocco, which is a deeply…
As we’re approaching the end of Pride month, I’m thinking about a simple idea: progressive and inclusive ideas about gender identity, gender expression, and sexuality benefit everybody, not just the most marginalized. It’s similar to the “curb cut effect,” where universal design has the side effect of helping everyone, not just the people most affected by it. There’s been pushback against the idea of the curb cut effect itself, boiling down to the argument “why not just help disabled people…
Everyone is doing more with AI. More spend, more tokens, more usage, and that’s become the thing people point at to show they’re getting value. Look how much we’ve ramped. Look at the adoption curve. And yet the same people quietly complain the impact isn’t landing the way they expected. The usage went up. The shipping didn’t.I’ve been chewing on this for a few weeks. I think two things are going on. Most people are wrong about what good use of AI actually is. And there’s a structural reason…
As you may know from reading my previous blog posts or bio, I’m an avid hiker and lover of the outdoors. Lately, though, I’ve become aware of something a bit more unexpected about my hikes. It isn’t that I’ve been discovering new trails or chasing spectacular views. Instead, I’ve found myself unintentionally revisiting old memories because something on the trail brings them back. Sometimes it’s the way sunlight filters through a stand of tall pines. Sometimes it’s the earthy scent after a…
I bought a dumb-watch. So far I love it. Why? The price was a mere $22. The feature-set is simple. And its battery life is measured in years, not days or hours. It’s a Casio digital. Yet it’s kind of analog. Looks kind of like e-Ink. How’s a digital watch analog? Well, it’s not “smart.” It doesn’t track fitness. It only tracks time. That’s it. And it’s a dedicated single-purpose device: a wearable clock. The simple feature-set is: 12/24 hour time Stopwatch Alarm (only one) There’s just one more…
Stars of the Open, US Open – Flushing, New York I’m proud to announce that Issue 84 of my fabulous photography magazine is hot off the digital presses (via email). An article and a photo essay about a gem of a small town I absolutely loved in Greece, thoughts and observations about my first year of retirement, the most recent Substack posts, and more. Sign up for the free magazine to get the next issue and access to all the previous issues. We splurged on one event during Fan Week: the Stars of…
Roden Readers — Go Knicks! Or something like that. What a time to be in NYC. (So everyone tells me.) I watched the last game in the courtyard at a Jane Jacobs–designed co-op in the West Village surrounded by kids and crunchy adults and then wandered in a collective stupor through the streets of New York until about two in the morning bearing witness to decades of repressed joy. A few nights later, Matt Rodbard and I were having dinner in Fort Greene and in walked Spike Lee, looking as happy as…
