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…

Although this has quite a few things that are not super well thought through and executed, this was a nice little film. Definitely liked the set and the surrealist quality this had.

Hello there. We are in the sweet spot between Halloween, and Christmas. And since I am european I do not give two craps about Thanksgiving, and it is way too early to feature holidays games. I could have featured a Christmas Themed Slay the Spire game that was very good, I decided to go on another direction. Let me introduce you to: Finicky controls. I guess it could become a genre on its own, I encountered a few games like this. This game is a fun take on the miniature car genre. You can only…

Hello again GMT. Zero gyms, because I was in Kyoto, then Tokyo again. 🇯🇵 Shinkansen to Kyoto, a few nights there, then back to Tokyo for a couple of nights before flying back. I’m home now, slowly reacclimatising to my native time zone and social conventions. I feel jet lagged and exhausted from two weeks away. I don’t have the energy to write, so in lieu of that, here are some photographs. Back to work tomorrow.

This morning I woke up feeling really good. My nose was super stuffy but that is nothing new. I was thinking that I wanted to get back to my lifts early this morning. I was feeling very refreshed and recharged too! Molly had vacation so we did other stuff when she had off. We got out geocaching and did some other running around. I normally do still squeeze my lifts in but this time I decided not too. The geocaching was a great way to get outside. WE would have been robbing ourselves if we did…

There are multiple trains running through the Harz. Nice ride into the past.

It has been a week since I began this experiment, as “training” for my year of writing. Seven days. Today I had no subject matter, having poured all my thoughts into today’s blog post. But then, I thought about “The House of Spirits” and my quest for an audiobook. I listened to the preview, and this is how I will approach it. I learn to listen to audiobooks as aid for more difficult books due to dyslexia. While I love big books on my hands, memories intertwined with their physicality,…

Daily Drawing 1043

Spotting a blackboard on the pavement outside The Highbury Vaults we both gasped with delight: Young’s Winter Warmer is on! Coming out of the misty cold, navigating through the crowded bar, we ordered Winter Warmer, of course, and carried out treasure to a table in the backroom. Then we looked at our pints – brown, glinting red, with an off-white foam – and thought, wait, what are we so excited about, exactly? We’re not even sure, without checking, who owns the brand and where the beer is…

LLMs don’t know how to design software that uses LLMs. They’re comfortable writing normal programs, but if you throw an AI-shaped problem at them, they will usually screw it up. Why is that? Going down the symbolic rabbit hole For example, this post describes an attempt to vibe-code a memory tool that would flag when one memory contradicted another1. This is a great instance of a task that was virtually impossible five years ago but is now relatively trivial due to LLMs. You can simply task a…

Browsers are beginning to take responsibility for how websites look in dark mode, even when the websites themselves haven’t implemented it. On November 3, WebKit announced Adaptive Dark Mode in Safari 27.3 beta. When a user enables it, Safari can analyse a predominantly light website and transform it into a dark appearance. It adjusts backgrounds, text, gradients and certain graphics while trying to preserve usability and contrast. It’s kind of similar to Chrome’s auto dark mode origin trial,…

Four weeks at number one from 27th August 1988Strange things were brewing in the Creation Records offices in 1988. On the one hand, Commander McGee had, along with a significant swathe of the British population, got into House music. According to the marvellous book "My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize", he could be found in clubs in London and Brighton, happily swirling around to the latest sounds while under the influence of mountains of delicious ecstasy. Accompanying him would be a…

Amongst the noise and crowds in Nagoya and Tokyo I found courteous transit, commercial design with an abundance of character, and behind-the-scenes exhibitions from one of my favourite game developers. | Read full post >>

Share a track by your favorite vocalist of all-time. I once worked at a place with a lot of fellow music lovers. We had an album of the week system running for a while, someone would bring in a CD, rip it to the network and we’d discuss it in a specific email channel. The music was an eclectic mix, and some of the artists I discovered there remain on my playlists today. Every now and then someone would bring in a “classic” and that’s how the story of how I spent one summer digging through the…

In a week of change and closure and moral arcs bending, I spotted something I’ve never seen before, and that was our Alan all alone. ‘Our Alan’ being Alan Turing, which is to say the statue of him in Manchester. It’s located by his old office, and a minute’s walk from the Crown Court where […]

Thoughts on: Allende, I. (2026). Storytelling : a masterclass in crafting stories. Bloomsbury. I have a confession to make. I have never read any of Isabel Allende books, not for lack of trying. Growing up, I was apathetic towards matters of Latin America censorship and the history, my mind always dreaming of distant continents instead. Also, I dreaded the blocks of text Spanish literature, not dyslexia friendly —I did not know I enjoyed reading until I found American literature with more…

Next year must mark the beginning of some answers- answers and accountability for the rampant, in your face corruption, illegality and blatant criminality that has besieged and been allowed to infect our entire country, particularly for those individuals directly affected in the most direct and traumatic manner...

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of…

Today's Sunday Snoozles™ are (perhaps) not as snooze-tastic as some, but they get the job done. First up is this 1957 view taken from somewhere in the queue up in the Fantasyland Skyway chalet. I kind of think that the photographer might have been exiting the ride, but I don't really know. We can assume that little Casey Jr. was the thing that was supposed to be the main subject, but it is too far away and we must laugh at the photographer. Derisively! I'll wait. Beyond the borders of the park…

Last weekend we decided Bowser needed to get dressed up for a Halloween photoshoot. I had already had a Sunday Schnauzer post scheduled for November 1 so here it is – Bowser’s Howloween – better late than never. Hey pack! Look at what I found lying around the house!!! Biting the hand being held by the hand that feeds him. Standing guard over his new treasure. I dares ya to try and take it from me! We hope you had a fabulous Howloween yourselves! Rock on, and Elbows Up! The WB (and Zombie Bowser)

Goon: Last of the Enforcers (2017)

I spent last week reading the source of two serious pieces of agent infrastructure — Google’s Agent Substrate and ax, its “Agent Executor” — and holding them up next to my own little launcher, agentdev. I went in half-expecting to feel foolish about my homegrown thing. And I did. Substrate and ax are better. Genuinely, no-contest, better-engineered better. AND… they’re better at a problem I don’t have. Both of those are true.

The past year I’ve been working a lot with certificates and trust management, which can, sometimes, yield its own fun stories and learnings. Here’s one: say you’re given a leaf certificate and its intermediate, but not the root. Which one do you trust? Trusting the leaf may look reasonable, since that is the certificate they sign with, but it defeats the whole purpose of a trust anchor. For those who’ve worked with X.509 certificate management, you know what the problem is, and feel free to…

Quick bits This week, I walked so fast that my iPhone enabled the Vehicle Motion Cues feature. I must’ve been in a hurry. I had a Brezel in London. It is the worst Brezel I have ever tasted, and I have tasted some genuinely terrible ones. It is that time of the year where I make spiced coffee. Yum yum. And it works with reasonably cheap affordable supermarket coffee beans, too! I love how quaint some of the DLR station names are. Pudding mill lane! Poplar! Mudchute! I also love how fully grown…

Personal notes for week 45 of 2026

Sharing a Wordpress website I developed for the African animal welfare non-profit, MetricFauna. By creating a custom child-theme, it could be customized for the brand including custom icons, graphics, and careful selection of stock photography by African photographers as much as possible.

The owl comes in to land; before he touches down, he is a man again. Which of the two does he rest in? Does the shape that lands remember the shape that flew, or only the task? He has never had to decide the timing; the change happens on contact and with intent. I know that contact from one night a long time ago, before any of this had a name.

Tuta will hopefully not become the villain any time soon.

There is a large concrete tower built near the Jefferson/La Cienega Metro station in LA called The Wrapper. It looks fucking nuts. Some people hate it, but I don't mind the way it looks at all. I think it's dumb that it's huge, yet seems to be nearly unused - I have never once seen cars going in here - but I don't mind the way it looks at all. We went there on an overcast day recently: We tried to get inside but were unable to. A security guard found us looking at the doors and told us we could…

Per Wiki A 2023 study recorded a dwarf reed snake “cartwheeling” to escape when startled.[5] The rolling motion is four times faster than the snake’s normal slither,[7] reaching speeds of around 9 miles per hour (14 km/h),[8] and requires a great deal of energy, limiting its use to emergencies such as an immediate threat.[9] The authors of the 2023 paper speculated that it may also hinder predators by confusing them, or by making the snake’s scent trail harder to follow, as only a small portion…