I use the Snoozz extension to park browser tabs for later action. I also have some tab that I open at regular scheduled times to do things. So I rely on those tabs to pop up in a week or in a month’s time. Obviously I have no way of recalling right now exactly which tabs they are, as that is why they are parked for later. So imagine my extreme irritation this morning, when I find that Brave has just broken my workflow without any warning at all. The notice just says “The extension was turned…

1987 U.S. Gold Platforms: Amstrad CPC, IBM PC, Commodore 16 Masters of the Universe – The Super Adventure and The Arcade Game were two games based on the Filmation cartoon Masters of the Universe, released by US Gold in 1987. The games have you as He-Man, who fights to deal with the evil forces of Skeletor, who is determined to take over Eternia. The franchise has received a cult following over 40 years, culminating in the release of a new live action movie in June 2026 by MGM Amazon. The Super…

2022 historical mystery; tenth in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). The Gages are staying at a remote castle for a wedding party; but when Kiera is introduced to the owner's famous art collection, she's disturbed to notice that some of the most notable pieces are forgeries…

People keep asking me how I actually work with Claude Code now. Not the “does AI coding work” question — I’ve beaten that horse into glue on this blog already — but the boring, practical, how-does-my-loop-actually-work question. So here it is. The whole rig. And fair warning: what I’m about to describe is a chainsaw, and most of the industry is still lined up at the axe-throwing contest, spitting on their hands.

Minions & Monsters (2026) • View trailer3.5 stars (out of five); rated PG, for animated violent action and rude/macabre humorAvailable via: Movie theatersBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.5.26Minions features always have felt less like a coherent film, and more like a randomly assorted collection of sight gags, but this one is particularly scattershot. (It’s no accident that the Minions work best in cartoon shorts.) Although the slyly duplicitous Goomi (the little green…

Public schools have been drafted again and again to fight national problems (e.,g., racial segregation, teenage pregnancy, cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol, and drug use). Americans believe that schools must be part of any solution to social problems. This idea is deeply embedded in the American psyche and schooling practices. It has led to educators adopting actual courses and curriculum materials to remedy national social problems. For example, three-fourths of U.S. schools have programs…

"Finisterra" is a 2007 science fiction novelette by David Moles. It is about an engineer from Earth who contracts out to help poachers on a distant world make their biggest kill yet. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: Bianca Nazario grew up on post-singularity Earth as a minority Christian living under an Islamic government. For generations the members of her family have been aeronautical engineers, but when her parents die and her brothers marry she is left with very few professional or…

Today, we’re going to have a look at the CI/CD pipelines for Resonite, and admittedly, I’m at my third attempt at writing this blog post. I started writing this post back when work started on the pipelines, trying to keep it in sync. However, while I was adding more features, and patching others, I didn’t have the time to update the draft which ended up completely desynchronized from the pipelines themselves. The release of the Unity renderer as an Open-Source project also changed plans quite a…

Jumping spiders are, I think, generally agreed to be the cutest spider. What makes an animal cute? Especially this representative of one of the most-feared animal groups, the spider? It’s fuzzy, like a teddy bear. It has big eyes, like a baby fox. It holds its pedipalps, those little things that stick out on either side of the mouth and look like legs but aren’t, so politely, pointing down, like it’s trying to avoid upsetting you. It has a big cuddly abdomen and the fuzz makes its legs look…

Dutch travelog, part 6.5. Read part 6 here. We arrived in Utrecht around 19:30. Mozzarella would be hosting us for the next two nights. We were to meet at the station, near his gate. Around 5 minutes later, I spotted him and waved. He smiled widely as he walked towards us and hugged us both. We rode the escalator down to where the bus terminals were. M lives in a quaint neighborhood just outside of the city center; about a 10-minute bus ride away. My cousin lives in a modern high-rise building…

I’ve been reviewing some of our Camino photos, and there were some I didn’t use because they just didn’t fit in with the Camino route or the city we were visiting, or I didn’t have room in a particular blog for more photos. I thought I’d share some of them with you… just because. Cows, chimps, giraffes, bugs, lizards… what’s not to like?In Porto, a life-sized Holstein at the entrance of Ale-Hop, a Spanish retail chain famous for its bovine mascot. If you look closely, the cow appears to be on…

The United States of America will shortly be celebrating 245 years since it achieved independence and I thought I would mark the occasion with some American beers. As it happened, there was something of a theme to what was in my fridge when I went looking for candidates.Another Sierra Nevada brand extension? Hell yeah! This is Mango Little Thing, number eleventy-seven in the hazy IPA series, this time with tropical fruit added. It's a gentle 6% ABV and an innocent sunny yellow colour; hazy but…

This is my second year playing the C=tar live at Wood Chip Fest, a small 8-bit music festival in Denmark.

First time in Cambridgeshire. First proper time anyway. There’s a free car park in the middle of the city and on a Thursday night the people of town trek back and forth between their mk. II Skoda Fabia Combis and their wellness classes. There are a surprisingly number of wellness studios in Ely, and a surprising number of pubs also.We walk up to the cathedral; a mixed group of parents and older folks dressed nicely but not formally mill on the cathedral green. Groups of lads in threes and fours…

Here are my stats for January to June 2026. This was generated using my data from Exist, and I found it highlights some key facts I hadn't considered as much as I should. Key Themes I should make sure I hit at least 5,500 steps in a day before I retire to play games or watch TV in the evening. I should keep up my reading habit, and try and read at least every other day. I should continue with my diet plan (Huel!), as it seems to be working! I really need to think about what makes the difference…

July 3, 2026 Our heroine, the ambitious bank employee, takes her wardrobe inspiration from this beautiful work: At the end of June, her wardrobe included 28 garments: And this snappy assortment of accessories. Our heroine is beginning to really understand the joy of wearing scarves… This month, she’s finally buying a suit! It’s linen, so she understands that it’s for mostly warmer weather, but she’s absolutely NOT opposed to buying a second suit for cold weather. Men wear suits every day… And…

Got up at 9.30. Did the mowing and a bit of weeding. Wind still cold. Joan and her three children came in the afternoon. The two eldest grown up now. Surprised to see them.

Hello, I have been thinking about something for like a year or so, but I have not really been able to put it into practice much. Today, I want to finally write about it. I have been sick on and off for like a month now and am currently taking antibiotics. I wanted to wait until I was completely healthy again to write anything, but I have been waiting for a month and right now I am feeling comfortable enough coughing fit to try and write this post. Anyway, now let's talk about Naruto. LOL. Bear…

You want some new metal releases? Of course you do. Let’s get in to it. Hails! Dichotomy - death - USACoprolith - death - CanadaMortem - death - NorwayMouflon - death/doom - NetherlandsPseudobiblion - death/doom - ItalyMylingen - death/black - SwedenAgarwaen - black - FinlandDragsholm - black - USAIn Throes - post black - AustraliaEutonazia Kordax - symphonic black - RussiaFrolic - thrash - USACrime Zone - thrash - NorwayHellionight - thrash/speed - BahrainTodoMal - doom - SpainWitchsorrow -…

I recently had a "phone support" call with my parents, where they needed help with their computers and smartphones and the internet router. They regularly ask me for help, because they're completely overwhelmed and out of their depth when it comes to modern technology, and it makes me sad to see how much they struggle with their devices. We have incredible technology these days; things that 40 or 50 years ago were pure science fiction, like a supercomputer that you carry around in your pocket…

So the other night, as I was working on my Final ’90s Countdown post about Strange Attractors, I did what I usually do when prepping these and tried to log into the old Diamond Comics retailer portal. While that version of Diamond was no longer an operative business, having since become “Diamond Select Brands,” a division of Enesco, the product database was still (mostly) functioning on the old site and I would use it for research. When I tried to log in last night, and received an error…

There's just something about the classic Autopia; I love the various styles that Bob Gurr cooked up over the years (even though versions he dislike, such as the Mark V cars), I love the winding miniature highways, and the often-smiling faces on kids and adults alike. Big Sis is returning to the Autopia load area, based on her expression I'd say she had fun. I'm a little confused about the fact that we are seeing Mark VI cars in June of '67, since the familiar Mark VII cars were introduced this…

Burn After Reading (2008)

At a glance, Dekitate High School appears to be an intriguing bundle of bits. There’s a dash of Princess Maker-like raising sims in the way I’m expected to guide one teenage girl through three crucial years of her education. The presentation and setting brings Tokimeki Memorial‘s school days to mind. And building to a budget based on certain needs is all a bit SimCity. Pulling such unusual styles together can create something incredible and new. Or, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed from the…

Last year I got myself a PO Box and started asking Internet strangers to send me a postcard, if they liked, rather than plain old email and contact forms. Since then, I’ve enjoyed an occasional surprise “postcard from the Internet”, and I’ve been collecting them on a page of their own. It was extra-surprising to receive a postcard from an in-real-life friend: somebody who knew my actual address1! What’chu looking at? I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but this bird actually gives me “Ele…

Photo by Milad Fakurian on UnsplashImagine you wanted to design a machine that would pull the maximum possible amount of money out of a person terrified of dying. You wouldn’t build it around the interventions that work. The interventions that work are boring, and worse than boring, they’re free, and a machine that recommends free things can’t sustain a market cap. You’d build instead a machine that waves continuously toward the frontier of biological possibility, telomeres and senescent cells…

So apparently there’s this new film, right, called “Young Washington”, and at the end of it, Kelsey Grammer talks directly to the audience. It’s not as if the film is breaking the fourth wall with a character suddenly turning to us, it’s more a separate advert that will presumably be ditched when this thing finally goes to streaming. But it’s Kelsey Grammer, he’s talking to the audience, and he’s asking them to buy more tickets to this film, whether or not they then go see it again. “With your…

I made a timelapse animation of sea level from 1993 to 2022. Do you notice the sea level seesaw in the Pacific during ENSO? Fascinating, isn’t it! What else do you observe? Sea level data: Fournier S., Willis J., Killett E., Qu Z. and Zlotnicki V. 2022. JPL MEaSUREs Gridded Sea Surface Height Anomalies Version 2205. Ver. 2205. PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Some interesting details. I set the video to 3x speed and it was still slow. For some reason, this Meta graphic is much faster with better colors as…

I can't recall if someone else originally came up with this saying or if I said it in some off-the-cuff comment and it just propagated, but since it's often attributed back to me, I'll relay it here regardless:Trying to delete yourself from the internet is like trying to take piss out of a swimming poolDepending on the publication, I'll tailor the saying to be either more broadly palatable or more, uh, "Australian", but the sentiment doesn't change: once data spreads on the internet, you can…

Now there are certain doors in life that are never meant to be opened. For me it's Groundhog Day having worked in automotive design for such a long time, but Area 57 (Sam's own words) within an automotive design studio is one of them.A mythical place whispered about in hushed tones where outsiders imagine dragons, laser sharks and at least one engineer who communicates entirely in CAD file extensions.Sam wandered in looking like he'd accidentally won a competition he didn't remember entering,…