Check out As in guillotine... for more. NOTE: It’s been a hectic few weeks with the new gig, and I attended my first industry conference in Philly earlier this week, so this is a bit more random collection of things than usual. Each one’s worth a click, though, so get to reading! _ONE Before Rolling Out a New Strategy, Assess Your Team’s Readiness | Steven Morris Skill gaps are not personal failures; they’re structural realities. And when they go unexamined, they produce an execution struggle…

A few days ago I booked a Novotel hotel on Booking.com - two days later I received these phishing messages via WhatsApp. Both knew my exact name, phone number, location of stay, and date of stay. Luckily, both were fairly inept. Let's take a quick look at them. The first came from a Portuguese business account. Obviously the name doesn't match that of the large chain hotel I booked with. The domain name doesn't look anything like what I'd expect from either Booking.com or Novotel. They note…

We'll see how this plays out -- carpet-bombing anti-Democrat attack ads in Texas has been an effective strategy for thirty years now -- but this Talarico response strikes me as a smart approach. It avoids the "am not" trap of trying to rebut negative ads point by point which always comes off as weak and instead comes off strong by going on the offensive. The numbers I've seen has Musk polling in Trump territory and while those numbers may be a little better in the Lone Star state, anti AI/tech…

I had a hard time putting this down.

Strong inversion in the Mon Valley at Clairton Coke Works, 23 Oct 2026, 7:09am (screenshot from BreatheCam Project) 23 October 2026 If you live in Pittsburgh’s Monongahela Valley and have smelled a rotten egg smell this week or you’re finding it hard to breathe here’s why. This week’s beautiful sunny days and cold nights cause inversions when warm air above traps cold air in our valleys. All of our valleys are affected but the Monongahela Valley has three heavy industries that produce air…

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!The Strange Company HQ staffers wish you pleasant reading!A handy reminder that bees are weird.A look at medieval executioners.The world's oldest dated printed book.A stupid theory about the Salem Witch Trials that refuses to die.The 11th century abbot and the recycled sarcophagus.The duel between W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley.The man who made a living from being a conjoined twin.The death of Pretty Boy Floyd.Remembering the Cat Lady of Spitalfields.A pattern…

⏪ Weeks in rewind O my, it’s been a while since I’ve done a rewind. Time to get back in the saddle. 🤒 My overall health wasn’t great in the past weeks. Ever since my business trip and 10k test race 5 weeks ago, I’ve felt like being on a seesaw. A few days I felt ok, others I felt really bad. I guess underfueling during my heavy running weeks started it, and a viral infection took over. As a result, I felt very unfocused, unmotivated and spent quite a few days with aspirin, and/or on the sofa.…

If you picked up your phone to get one specific thing done, and you’ve done it, put it down. And just stare. It’s hard at first. The pull to open it back up is strong, to keep scrolling for one more hit. We love searching for that small comforting hit of having checked everything there is to check. But it’s worth training ourselves to put it down. And stare some more.

Well, this short film by the Irish Traditional Music Archive is right up my alley! It looks at the first transatlantic telegraph cable and the traditional music of West Kerry, particularly the song Ámhrán na Leabhar: From the naomhóg, which for centuries connected the islands, peninsulas and coastal communities of Uíbh Ráthach, to the arrival of the world’s first successful transatlantic telegraph cable at Valentia, An Cábla agus an tAmhrán reveals a remarkable continuity: while technologies…

Step right up! Get ‘em whilst they’re fresh. A full batch of new metal releases to get our teeth into. Hails! Saprobiontic - death - GermanyFeeding - death - CanadaAbyssus - death - GreeceNephilim Grinder - death - USATumorflesh Rejection - death/slam - RussiaEmbryectomyA Distorted Utopia - tech death - UKBeaten to Death - grindcore - NorwayAbsolute Darkness - death/thrash - USALitost - black/death - SpainObscura Qalma - black/death - ItalySathanas - black/death - USAMessier 16 -…

Remember when I said that I was done signing up for every new service that comes along? Yeah, me too. But... Today I learned about quxnet via the always interesting Linkdump, from 82MHz. Of course I created an account immediately because how could I not? I mean, there's an SSH/TUI interface for it. Sold! Quxnet has everything. Boards, mail, photo galleries, links, blogs, an RSS reader, and more. It looks super-retro cool, which adds to the vibe. I don't know what I want out of it yet, but if it…

📷 279/365 - Fun on the water

I will be in Indianapolis next week for the annual conference of the Association for Preservation Technology International. It’s a little strange in that this is the first APT conference in about ten years where I don’t have any specific role to play. I’ll explore Indy a bit, I guess. That picture’s only 119 years old…how much can have changed?

There's just so much that is depressing about the disappearance of an online game. When a conventional single-player game reaches the end of its commercial life, the original hardware and a copy of the disc are often enough to revisit it decades later. Online games aren't quite so fortunate. Their servers disappear, the communities move on, and entire worlds become inaccessible, preserved only through screenshots, videos and the memories of the people who once called them home.EverQuest Online…

I am, once again, cheating (a lot). I had originally planned to finally read Hamilton’s Battalion for the July TBR Challenge (theme: Freedom!); alas, shit happened, and I…did not. As I find myself behind again with this month’s read, I’m muddling my way through by reviewing one of the three novellas in the anthology 1 as my (very) belated entry for that month, and posting it (by itself, for now–hopefully I’ll post reviews for the other two stories THIS YEAR). Note: I have no memory of how I…

The blue carpet stops at a doorway. You step over a strip of worn brass. There are floorboards beneath your feet now, and walls close enough to touch. Behind you, a voice is still speaking. You can no longer make out the announcement. Ahead, someone laughs in another room. You are in a house. You recognise parts of it. The turn in the stairs. A chair with one arm worn smooth. You put your hand on the back of it, trying to remember where it used to stand. You thought the fire had taken this.…

I've started work on a card game and I have no idea what I'm doing so if anyone has any good articles to check out, send them my way. I was personally attacked at the weekend while driving through Basingstoke and saw a sign for a museum exhibit entitled "I Grew Up 90s". Given the 90s were only 10 years ago[1], this seems premature. DNS Museum is a reference for the odd, inventive, and always impractical things people have done with DNS. Maths over DNS anyone?. Speaking of DNS, Record Relay is…

I've never really tracked my #100DaysToOffload effort very well, so I decided to create a page to help me track it. Turns out I've completed the challenge 7 times! https://kevquirk.com/100 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I’ve been having this almost-debate with Matt Pocock for a while about the best way to do spec driven development.Matt is a very accomplished old-school developer. A true software engineer. And he’s been using AI to enhance his capabilities to an extraordinary degree. His development skills are extremely powerful, and have been starred more than almost any other skills repo on GitHub.So what’s my disagreement?Basically I think he is at the top of the mountain for the old way of doing things.…

I realised that what made it take such a long time was having a different sound and a different vocal mood for each song- you couldn't just choose a setting and have it the same all the way through, like you can with some records. One more headphone listen later, and then it's going to be uploaded for sending off to be mastered.

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 24th April 2026 A new At the Gates record should be a moment of anticipation that has little rival in 2026, but when it comes on the heels of the death of iconic vocalist Tomas ‘Tompa’ Lindberg, finally succumbing to the cancer he has bravely fought for years, and the knowledge that it was using the last recordings of him, ‘The Ghost of a Future Dead’ feels more like an impossible feat. How do you even begin to critically evaluate something like this, when…

It has been a busy few days, especially yesterday, but happily, we've gotten some important tasks done. We should have a tech arriving at our fixer-upper house in Spartanburg to get our internet set up--which meant we spent an hour yesterday finding the Spectrum sales store, waiting for 10 minutes, and then going over our options and making a choice.After doing that, we got in the car to head back to our home in Arden. We sat in stopped traffic because of a lane closure due to bridge work. It…

A few months ago I was boarding a flight out of Detroit, standing in a long line of passengers behind a woman who was with two boys aged maybe 10 or 11. As we approached the aircraft door, the woman turned to the boys and said five words. I contend that these are five words no adult has ever felt the need to say, in any language, to two girls.Those words were: “No spitting on the airplane.”She said this because the boys had been passing the time, as the passenger line moved slowly down the jet…

My flight Monday out of Calgary was at 6:30, but I had received an email from Air Canada warning of congestion at security because the Nexus line was closed. The last time I took the same flight out of Calgary, the lineup was extremely long, so I thought arriving early might be wise. Except when I got there, the airport was almost empty.I checked out of my hotel at 3:58, got in the cab at 4:00, and was standing outside the Air Canada lounge waiting for it to open by 4:28. Two minutes early. I…

Once upon a time, I was puzzled by people who were asking what is a podcast. All along, I thought it was pretty clear: just go read the specs and see if that thing conforms to it. After a while, I realized these people are talking about podcasts as a genre, not a technology. This is not about RSS and enclosures. This is not about following and downloading. It is about the style of an audio program, about people talking to each other with microphones. And that is why there are people who claimed…

Architectural detail of the abandoned and historic Gold Dome Building—originally built in 1958 as Citizens National Bank and designed by Buckminster Fuller—in Oklahoma City. The post Half Dome appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I’ve gotten back into the habit of checking the news in the morning as I slowly wake up, still comfy cosy in bed. Not for very long. Not enough to consider it doomscrolling. Just to peek at whatever’s in the headlines, laugh at the DUP if they’re involved in something, and move on with my day. Today there’s a story about ADHD treatment in Northern Ireland. Or the lack of it, rather. It’s where the title comes from. It goes into a couples expenses for paying privately (4k a year) and mentions…

Sarah has written about Dorothy Pilley and Evelyn Cheesman before, but this is the proper full-length treatment in a group biography: five outstanding women who spent their lives in and working for nature conservation, in different ways. At the beginning of the twentieth century Mina Hubbard mapped significant parts of North Labrador with First Nation … Continue reading Wildly Different, by Sarah Lonsdale →

New project: The Visitor’s News. I’d love for you to subscribe and participate. (In fact, the whole thing hinges on participation!) I’d like to get out a November issue so if you want to be a correspondent, please send in your subscription and letter in the next couple of weeks.