Cover version of the month #124Beats International cover The S.O.S. BandLove is a game of chancesSo I'll take my chance with youEarlier this year I started a new night / club/ event / community called Uddingston Vinyl Lovers Club (find us on Facebook/Insta). The first night was held at The Rowantree Inn on a Saturday back in May, and then returned for a Sunday Social, afternoon into evening in August. September saw an incredible night of music and dancing in the Cricket Club with Gerard Love…

In the previous part, I took a wander around Sim Lim Square, the premier IT mall in Singapore which focuses mostly on electronics and computers. It was a slight disappointment to see how many units were vacant and closed, but that’s not all, because there’s another nearby destination – Sim Lim Tower (SLT) which pre-dates SLS and has more of an electronic components focus. History & Information What follows is an abridged summary of Wikipedia’s article on Sim Lim Tower as it seems the is no…

Life ~Godot~ Darek didn’t come the next day. Or either of the days in the week he said he would. But on Sunday he finally made it. He claims to have fixed the leak, but we now have two new plumbing-related issues that he’s suggesting are coincidental. Seems unlikely! I think what’s going to happen is we’ll come to the end of the three month warranty period for the work and then get a proper plumber in. Perhaps we should just be doing that now, but Darek’s so charming it’s hard to resist getting…

Long time readers will know of my drawn out struggle to find photography again since falling ill to long covid - as written about here and here and a few times in my Life this week series. I endlessly miss working with a camera to create images of the world around. In a different lifetime, I wrote: In that moment of pause, I bear witness and enter into an act of reciprocity with the world. I step out of my worries, quieten my mind, and let my body experience the world. In return, I attempt to…

On the most recent changes to the super-configurable web page minifier.

Maynooth University Library Cat seems to have survived Storm Austen intact. In fact, all we experienced here in Maynooth was a moderate amount of overnight rain and a bit of a breeze. He seems to spending a bit more time these days at the entrance to South Campus on Kilcock Road, where he is pictured here doing his ablutions. His more usual spot is off in the distance, on the left of the picture, past the Library.

What was Martine’s Wine Bar? One way to describe it: “It was a wine bar that turned into a restaurant that focuses on wine…There’s no specific style of cuisine, a lot of French, Italian. It’s got vaguely Euro-bistro vibes”. Another way to describe it: perfect. It was barely open for two years, and in those … Continue reading On restaurants loved and lost: Martine’s Wine Bar

Still slugging my way through the box. It is taking a lot longer than I thought it would even with the health issues factored in. It is a small project but the devil is in the build steps that I changed again today. I'm so close to the slapping on some shellac but no check mark for the done column today. Maybe tomorrow or the.....new lidResawing it as much as I can on the tablesaw. Like the first one I'll complete it with the japanese saw.hmm.....I tried to resaw the web evenly top to bottom…

While June and July are the peak of mothing season, there are plenty of stunning species that appear as the leaves fall and continue well into winter. Here in Cambridgeshire and beyond, any of the following species are likely visitors to your garden on a quiet night, drawn to an outdoor lamp, a steamy kitchen window, or the UV glow of a moth trap. Here are 10 UK macro moth species to look out for from mid-October onwards, especially for autumn and winter moth trapping. I’ve included species…

“…this fallible, fabulous human race, this improbably, beautiful planet in space…” - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “For This I Walk Outside”Hello friends! I just received Susan Tweit’s beautiful new book, “Earthbound”, and this poem was on the first page I opened. That page was titled, “gratitude for the gift of life.” Find a copy at your local bookstore or order it here! If you want to learn more about Susan, her substack is a great place to start!Here are my photo choices for today:October 20,…

Been running some DCC and had to create a spell for a DG tome that was taken during an opera!

Today’s San Francisco is a far cry from the city it was during WWII, but it can still turn out for the Navy at Fleet Week. U.S. Navy photo U.S. Navy photo Check out this view of the Parade of Ships under the Golden Gate, past Alcatraz, possibly including the last passing of a cruiser and an LSD. You will see USS Ashland (LSD-48), USS Cape St. George (CG-71), and USCGC Munro (WMSL-755). You will also see USCGC Benjamin Bottoms (WPC-1132) and the former USS Potomac (AG-25)/USCGC Electra (WPC-187).

Some 60 years ago today, just some Market Time surface action. The Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer USS Mansfield (DD-728) fires her 5″/38 guns at waterborne craft off North Vietnam, north of the DMZ, 25 October 66. Photographed by PH1 V.O. McColley, November 25, 1966. USN photo 428-GX-K-35025. From the report of her 1966 Vietnam Westpac cruise. She would revisit Vietnam for two additional tours, chalking up an amazing 1,727 NGFS missions according to CONGA, while taking a hit by a North…

How about this Yemeni “Saarim” (also seen as “Sarem”) copy of the 98 Mauser sniper rifle making the rounds in the (attributed) hands of a Houthi rebel, with a very Insurgency Sandstorm/Far Cry 6 vibe. Note the box magazine, pistol grip, garage-made suppressor (which, if nothing else, serves as a flash hider to help with counter-sniper fire), super-high mount (possibly to help overcome the 8mm Mauser’s rainbow ballistics), and relatively low-power optic. For those curious, Sarim / Sarem (صارم)…

Look – I know all about poetry’s reputation for romance, its alluring powers, the sly ways verse woos with line breaks and slant rhymes, but please consider what I know to be true after two years of reading more than 3000 stories: short stories are the most seductive literary form. …. [U]ltimately, it’s the elisions, rooted in the limited page counts, which form one of short fiction’s bedrock emotions: longing. Once the splinter of a story gets under your skin, after only 5000 words or so, you…

How to be a good flake.Today's mini-post is for Prismatic Wasteland's latest blogwagon, "How to Be a Good Player." I've shamelessly stolen this prompt from Chris McDowall, who's too busy making the next great Bastionland to write excuses. Not me though. I took the time to write down 50 bulletproof excuses for the next time you flake.Anyway, I'm sorry I can't make it to game night. I know. I know. It starts in five minutes, but I can't come tonight because...My wife went into laborI'm delivering…

Google's Gmail might be the preeminent mailbox provider. Launched in 2004, Gmail has grown from the "new kid on the block" into one of the biggest hosts of individual email mailboxes in the world. Depending on what data you look at, you might even see Gmail as the #1 mailbox provider, at least here in the US.Gmail's spam filtering systems incorporate user feedback and engagement. And they know what they're doing. If you are not sending wanted mail to people who requested that mail and who read…

By Manuele Fior (Translated by Matt Madden) Buy (affiliate link) Hypericum is one of two graphic novels by Italian authors that I picked up in my recent library excursion. Both involve Italians traveling overseas in the ’90s. Obviously Italy has artistic traditions spanning millennia, but Italian comics are a complete blind spot for me. After these two examples, I’m inclined to seek out more. Manuele Fior tells the story of Teresa Guerrero, an Italian student who has come to Berlin in the late…

I was recently asked to look at a change one of our developers made to RavenDB. He was chasing a particularly slow query with spatial sorting (a “find me all the nearest Thai restaurants” style of query). He found the root cause and had a fix ready. The fix gave us a 25% improvement in query processing time, and the change was about 15 lines of code.A few years ago, I would have said: great job, merge it, ship it, let customers enjoy the faster queries. But I got a hunch that we could do…

At Comfort TV, David presupposes Hall0ween with one of the many vintage made-for-TV horror movies of the 1980s, Don't Go to Sleep, with Dennis Weaver , Valerie Harper, and Ruth Gordon. A classic telemovie cast!Keeping with the telemovie theme, Gill takes on The Curse of King Tut's Tomb at RealWeegieMidget, in honor of one of its stars, Eva Marie Saint. And in passing, Gill mentions some of the great credits of this remarkable actress.Cult TV Blog has moved to another "theme" series of posts,…

Over the past 361 days, my weight has gradually decreased from 75.5 kg to 73.0 kg, a total reduction of 2.5 kg, averaging approximately 102 g per week. During the last year, my weight ranged from a peak of 80.0 kg to a current low of 73.0 kg.

How to Read a MuseOnce I’ve introduced the muses, the next question is how to make sense of what they say. What does affection look like for each one? How do they express interest, ask for closeness, or show a little vulnerability? And how much of that am I reading into the response myself? There’s a distinction worth making up front. When I talk about a muse’s desires, I mean the desires written into her character and expressed through generated conversation. I’m not claiming there’s a woman…

Three wise men, three angels, a shepherd, Mary & Joseph, who are we missing? wright20 I was the first great-grandchild, and one thing that imprinted on my family was that I liked nativity sets. Because when I went to my great-grandmother’s house, I played with a nativity set. The timing of the visit—Christmas, obv—and the absence in Grandma’s living room of any other things a 2yo was allowed to touch had nothing to do with it, of course. Anyway, if my great grandmother really thought I liked…

The Telegraph has introduced a new online newsletter called Characters, which reprints choice obituaries from recent years. As the obits have long been the best thing in the paper, I naturally signed up for this one – and today they came up with a gem from 2007. It's the obituary of one Sammy Duddy, who has the surely unique job description 'Loyalist Paramilitary for the Ulster Defence Association and notorious drag queen who went by the stage name of Samantha'. Sammy, or rather Samantha, was…

Our choice for the last 20 years has been between the #deathcult and #fascism, how the hell did we get into this mess? And how do we find a way out? To build a path we need shovels, not saviours. We need to dig through the shit, compost failures and regrow paths to grassroots collective power. To work on this we need to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the ground beneath our feet. Politics is the human condition, you’d have to be mad as a hatter, or a liberal, to…

Worthy Read is an ongoing series here at the blog where I link out to a piece I think is worth your valuable time. Chris Person / Aftermath: Is this AI?” my girlfriend will ask me, pointing to a post on TikTok or Instagram. If you’re online, you ask this question every single day. As the years have gone on and the models have gotten deceptively better, the talent of discerning what is and is not AI has entered into an arms race with what the models are capable of. This learned suspicion is…

Many young children arrive on our doorsteps ready to attend to us, to what we point out to them, to sing our songs, to play our games, and to follow our lead. In standard preschool classrooms, these are our teacher's pets.But then there are those other kids. These are the ones with their own agendas.Miranda had no interest in toys. Dolls, blocks, and puzzles were in her way. Other children were interesting unless they wanted to "pretend." She had little patience for pretending. She preferred…

There’s an interesting piece on WonkHE this morning, reflecting on the potential impact of GenAI on higher education via the impact of digital sharing and piracy on music. In brief, what happens to an industry when the limited resource from which it’s derived its profits suddenly becomes abundant (and when its previous means of controlling supply and getting paid don’t work any more)? Obviously I’m a sucker for comparisons between music and education (and have a vague recollection of writing a…

For a change, we're going to be fairly timely with this. Not with the subject of this post, but at least with the thing that sparked it. In October 2026, it came to light that the certificate authority eMudhra had been using remarkably secure private keys such as 4. That's how I came across this wonderful illustration: The key's randomart image is: +---[RSA 2048]----+ | | | | | | | | | 4 | | | | | | | | | +----[SHA256]-----+ Joking aside, the image is obviously far from reality, since these…

scheduled appointment withthe gastroenterologistfor unresolved digressive issues…this morning–while the airprickles the skin. I fast. just in case. a $50 copay was a near deterrent.a costly handing over of coinsto be sure nothing isthere that shouldn’t be.a choice that could breakmost during this season. isn’t it odd?the lengths we’ll go tofind out why our bodiesdecide what will continually hurt us without our consent?to seek answers when ourquestions do nothing buthover over us and cause added…