September 2026 Today I hoped I would finish walking the coast of Lithuania, continuing from Juodkrantė where I got to yesterday to the border with Russia, or at least as close as I could get. I was staying in Klaipeda, so after breakfast at the hotel I walked into the city centre and onwards to the ferry. This time I planned to get lunch before I crossed over but the shop near the ferry was closed, it didn’t open until 9am. I had assumed it would be open earlier. Oh well at least I know there…

I like geotagging & mapping photos. This wee AppleScript finds the location of a photo in the finder & opens OpenStreetMap showing where it was taken. Easily changed for other map webpages. Needs the wonderful exiftool. I run it from FastScripts, also wonderful.

My coworker was pretty lazy today 🐈‍⬛ Selfie a day for a year, day 55: Oct 23, 2026 edition.

I found out at the beginning of October that I was being laid off from World Resources Institute. For reasons far out of my control (but which anyone could see coming) our funding was constricted due to world politics and ongoing institutional challenges that weren’t addressed over years of rapid growth. My position, lofty as it sounds, became redundant, and my tenure made me expensive, so it was pretty clear I was on the chopping block. This seems to be a common issue with Gen X professionals…

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Sunny, calm, and cool. I missed Wednesday’s run due to assorted shenanigans, but did a full loop around the lake today. By coincidence, conditions were nearly identical to Monday, with cool temperatures, plenty of sun and no wind. After finishing the first km at a pace of exactly 6:00/km, my Performance Condition (PC) rating came up and was +6, which is quite high. I think my watch was happy I was running slower, because I always run faster than it wants. I also…

Still so much to do. But we're getting there. ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 17:34 Friday, 23 October 2026

Sometimes in these appearances I talk too fast, because frankly I have a million things I want to say. My mind is imagining the sand trickling down the hourglass and trying to pack in as much as humanly possible in the precious time we have together. But in this chat with Rob and Matt on their Dungeon Master of None podcast, I think I kept my pace a little more under control. I both start and finish sentences, which is nice. Dungeon Master of None (episode 425): Microscope 2e with Ben Robbins…

I've been having fun making little hand-drawn zines. If you're not familiar with them, they're basically little folded paper booklets. Often printed in small batches and folded by hand, they're a chance to hand out information on whatever topic you choose, or just to be a bit silly. There's something really fun about handing someone a tiny book that they can take with them, and it makes a really fun project for kids, too.There are a bunch of different sizes you can make, depending on your…

Martha left in the CRV Wednesday morning to return home and some appointments that she had made. I decided to camp one more night less than 20 miles away at the national forest dispersed camping area near Divide, Colorado.Got some more e-biking in along Forest roads that were coded with really small gravel, this gravel made it way too interesting when on a downward incline and trying to slow down on the e-bike. There is as I mentioned before no engine braking of course and so I found myself…

In which I show off another zine I made recently, this one on a group playing traditional Irish music. There are fun drawings!

About two years ago, curious about the buzz around generative AI for coding, I asked Claude to fix bugs and optimize the theme I use on the Manual. It spent a good while poking around the theme files. The changes it announced made sense. And how much had been slipping through the cracks! I was living in the future. Super excited, I fired up the modified theme and… the update triggered a fatal error and took the site down. I reverted every change and went on with my life. Unfortunately, I didn’t…

9:05 – Mon 19 October 2026 12:02 – Mon 19 October 2026 9:03 – Tue 20 October 2026 12:03 – Tue 20 October 2026 9:01 – Wed 21 October 2026 12:06 – Wed 21 October 2026 9:02 – Thu 22 October 2026 12:04 – Thu 22 October 2026 9:07 – Fri 23 October 2026 12:05 – Fri 23 October 2026 Bonus Follow Me As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators…

Still life.

Last week at a small conference, there was talk about a future event referred to as The Hackening. As in, within 6-12 months, many predicted that due to advanced AIs and AI agents the internet would become a severely hostile place. Some worried that this could rise to the level of ‘assume any phone connected to the internet is rooted’ and several people urged doing general crisis preparations on a personal level, in case of disruptions in supply lines, power, water or internet. It did not take…

Hi everyone, day two is over and I’m super tired! Writing these posts (and roughly editing photos) takes a surprising long time and I made the mistake yesterday to push through to get the day 1 post done on the day of … which completely mess up my sleep cycle So I’ll try to stay short today and catch up on some sleep. The day started quite funny: I spontaneously had thought about trying to pick up Queen Alice after all. Maybe all the exhibitor/press people would have gotten their copy yesterday…

DC Comics solicitations for January 2027 have been released. Not much to report. There were zero mentions of anything Hawkworld-related. Just one compact collection with Hawkgirl in the background. But it doesn't come out until June. So nothing for January. I heard there was something about Thanagar in a Green Lantern series, but the solicitations had no art or mentions. If you're looking for Hawkman and Hawkgirl stories, check out the complete list of Hawkan and Hawkgirl trades and…

I appreciate this isn't the most thrilling of topics but, when researching myself, I struggled to find any kind of advice online. We purchased 12 standing desks for the office. With the layout of our office, the plugs are only on 1 wall. We needed a way to run power to all the desks. Our existing solution involved extension leads under the desks with cables tied to desk legs. However, with the desks standing, this wouldn't work. We also wanted to use the excuse to tidy up our under-desk cable…

This short book is a little bit of an enigma. I picked it up as it was one of the few books on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 that I had not read. Paul Greengrass' film The Uprising has recently been released and I wanted to refresh myself as to the known history. Unfortunately while Ronald Webber tells the known story well, the book offers few insights.Two problems stand out. The first is that

Dear Constant Reader, I’ve been writing a bunch of different missives here and then I look up and it’s Friday again and I have sent you nothing between tips. It’s been quite a busy October… Hopefully, I can get one of them completed soon. In the mean time, here is your tip. If you are running a fundraiser, get a non-profit to be your fiscal sponsor. So many of us are civic-minded and like to support organizations that do good by means of our arts. However, handling the money can sometimes be…

This is the first half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today. In the last part (split over two posts), we discussed how HoI4 models domestic politics and ideology. In both cases, game design considers – in particular the desire to streamline domestic politics to highlight the military aspects of the game…

Do we talk about Beowulf? Yes, we do. Did we set out to talk about Beowulf? No, we did not. I was a guest on a livestream for the Ludonarrative Dissidents podcast, along with fellow guest Gareth Hanrahan, talking about Lord of the Rings, Synnibarr(?!?), and Beowulf. But mostly Beowulf. Ludonarrative Dissidents Livestream I mean yeah, we talk about the new Microscope and the amazing role-playing in This Means War, and we were supposed to be talking about their kickstarter for their new season,…

# Introduction Keeping an eye on published vulnerabilities is part of my work, but there are now too many CVE published every day to read them all, and the delay between the publication of a vulnerability and its first exploitation also became very short. In my opinion, this work cannot reasonably be done by hand anymore. My infrastructure is already updated automatically for nearly all its components, so most of the time a fix arrives without me doing anything. But sometimes, I need to react…

In March of this year, Apple acquired a motion graphics and visual effects subscription company called MotionVFX. No doubt this was a move to bolster Apple's own Apple Creator Studio. Ironically, I had just become a subscriber to MotionVFX a few months prior to this acquisition. Their focus on Final Cut Pro with a drag-and-drop approach was a perfect fit for me and my business. MotionVFX has these stylish collections of effects that help give videos a cohesive appearance. Some of these…

After my recent survey of modern black metal, a death metal follow up was all but inevitable. Commercially speaking, death metal seems to be in a healthier place than black metal, with bands like Blood Incantation threatening to transcend the genre in terms of their brand reach. Tastes in death metal also seem to behave a little more coherently than black metal, with certain styles trending in and out of favour in reliable phases. Black metal by contrast seems to cohere around key artists more…

Journal Spent a couple of days turning the first couple of years of blogging (2000-2002) into monthly pages for the forthcoming archive site. Back then I was using Blogger and it was pretty much a status—update tool, albeit without a word count. Most of the posts are a sentence or two and none of them have titles, so it’s a bit like Twitter was, maybe? In August 2002 a relationship ended and I moved into a shared flat which prompted me to start afresh, using titles this time (it’s very notable…

A popular engineering podcast1 asks their guests if they'd rather finish a project or start a dozen projects. Surely nobody starts any project without the intent to see it through to completion, but unfortunately, the realities of life often take over and thus we accumulate a shelf, box, or even garage full of unfinished projects. This describes me perfectly: I always have such high hopes for every project I begin, yet inevitably, the fun personal efforts fall victim to either massive scope…

Today is day 23 without alcohol. Not that I was drinking daily like in my "glory days," but if I did drink it would often turn into a binge or at least more than I initially intended. Self-control when it comes to substances has never been a strength of mine. But I figured if I am ever going to overcome this debilitating (wow it took me some time to spell this right) depression, anxiety, bipolar2 or whatever you want to call it, and if I really want to optimize the medication I am on, I should…

I had a list on my phone about things I needed to tell you but I can’t find it and now I’m just going from memory, which is not good for anyone. So first of all, I’m back from 48 hours in Iceland and I want to write all about it but I need toContinue reading "This is a lot of stuff and I don’t know where to put it all."