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.

As usual it’s taken me nearly the whole week to pick out the seven demos from the 8000+ I’m really keen for you to play too, but it’s been worth it. I’ve dug through and found some real treasures. The games below are all stunning in completely different ways, and their demos are featured in Steam’s Next Fest until Monday. Also, a whole bunch of them are coming out in the next couple of months! Remember to wishlist anything you like the look of – it’s a huge help for the developers, and for you.…

I want what she’s having. Seriously, right now I would give (almost) anything for the type of sex LM describes in this piece. The ‘reset fuck’, which brings you back to yourself and drags you out of your own head… unngh. LM has written some gorgeous guest pieces here before, so click the links in […]

I’ve always been dedicated to the idea of this as the time of year for spooky fun. So every year I collect all the spooky, creepy or scary content from the previous year into one place just before Halloween. If you’ve come to my blog in the past year, or don’t remember previous editions, they are “Trick or Treat”, “More Trick or Treat“, “Tricks and Treats“, “This Trick’s a Treat”, “Tricky Treats“, “A Trickle of Treats”, “Tricking and Treating“, “Tricks for the Treat“, “Tricked Out Treats“,…

Which rows changed on a branch, and which columns? Four queries, from a two-line EXCEPT to a reusable cell_diff macro. After the launch of the differential DuckDB v2 extension, a user asked: Would it also be possible to build diff views? Maybe it’s as simple as running a few SQL queries across different snapshots. It is that simple. differential doesn’t need a diff function, because every branch and every snapshot can be attached as an ordinary DuckDB catalog, side by side in one session. From…

On October 20th, someone posted the details of two critical PHP bugs on Hacker News, two days before a scheduled fix. The bugs, called PHP2Shell, don't need an account on your site, a vulnerable plugin, or a bug in your own code, just a form request like a file upload. About 69% […]

Date: 2026 – 10-23 Link: all-the-way-down summary: We’re now funding All The Way Down: A Cosmic Turtle Megadungeon starring the work of me and lots of my friends! — ../_Attachments/Turtle Time Final 2.mov This past June, my friend Onslaught Six got 7 of his friends together—including me—and we all spent June writing one dungeon room a day1 to make one big megadungeon. The culmination is All The Way Down: A Cosmic Turtle Megadungeon, a 120+ page hardcover which you can now back on Kickstarter! I…

Yesterday I got so overtaken with music that I forgot to even post my blog post. Which I’ve done a couple times before. But I’ve been doing and getting my preparations made for a seventh-grade dance, which I talked about a day or two ago. And I’m taking it very seriously. And I’m still taking it very seriously. It’s easy for a Gen X sort to have a bad attitude about new music, and all the nerds on the internet will give you nothing but permission for doing that because it’s not this or that.…

This blog post is an update of my journey in Djangonaut Space , an 8-week mentoring program for future open source developers in the Django ecosystem. Series: 3… 2… 1… becoming a Djangonaut Djangonaut Log 1: Lift-off and first week in Djangonaut Space Debugging a flaky test — how I methodologically tamed an annoying bug (you are here) A flaky is a automated test in software development that seemingly non-deterministically fails. I hate them with passion because they erode your trust to your…

A WILD DECEPTION Solemnly, a great dark chime summons a ring of black-cloaked figures, pleading forgiveness, singing of disgrace, circling round a stack of peasant props – tables, stools, brooms, hayforks. The cloaks are flung off, garlands thrown, penitence turns to a wedding celebration. If you’re in a late-booked £34 stage stall, threateningly close, the sense of passionate village primitivisim is overwhelming. It continues so for 95 tense minutes, with all the wild-sung passion that its…

When your open source project gets popular, the real work starts. I counted everything that happened in my repositories in the last 30 days, leaving out what I did myself: 42 new issues and pull requests a day from people. Spotifast and ZapFast, both two months old, brought in about 430 each. RubyLLM brought in about 270. 49 comments and review comments a day from people. About 125 comments a day from review bots. CodeRabbit alone left 2,669 review comments, and Copilot another 974. That’s…

9722/21641No Make-a-Wish moments today. Just had to look after my stupid no-famous family in our boring town. Maybe this means I am not dying after all.To be fair Ernie and me had been meaning to go to Battle, where the Battle of Battle took place in 1066 (Battle was asking for it - I know it's an old-fashioned attitude, but if you call yourself Battle then you are asking for people to battle on you). This would have been the equivalent of meeting Kyle Maclachlan, especially if, as hoped by…

This is yet another lament on the consequences of widespread use of generative AI, though a bit more aggressive than usual. Only proceed if you're still not tired of people complaining about large language models. I have a bad feeling about the Internet's future, and I'm not the only one. We already had problems with aggressive tracking, advertising, surveillance capitalism, attention economy, bloated websites with so many tracking techniques that privacy is virtually nonexistent, and websites…

Yeah, right! Walrus Mystery is as much a detective game as Walrus Warrior was an RPG. Or… Well, not entirely maybe. In other words, though Walrus Mystery isn’t but a rather casual affair – those expecting a gameplay spanning ten hours should look elsewhere – it’s not entirely a parody, either. In other words, this […] The post Walrus Mystery: a Free Detective Game appeared first on Home For Fiction - Blog.

I made both of these images within seconds of each other on a 2015 trip along the National Road in eastern Indiana. I made the image on the left with my Canon PowerShot S95, and the image on the right with a Canon TLb with a 50mm f/1.8 Canon FD S.C. lens mounted and Kodak Gold 200 inside. Doesn’t the right image have the quality of a 1960s or 1970s post card? Yet the left image has a contemporary look, in terms of color rendition and contrast. To get Down the Road in your inbox or reader six…

Next week Techorama in Utrecht is going to happen. The medieval edition in Belgium was fun and I’m looking forward to it again in Netherlands. I was lucky and 2 of my sessions were selected.

We managed to restart Ducal House after a seven month break - a second child-related campaign hiatus - putting it on the road to completing year seven as we hoped. The hiatus dropped on us unexpectedly early, shortly after I wrote 'Year Seven Begins' so the 149th session mentioned there was the last, we restarted with session 150. We forecasted a six month break and would have achieved that but for the bard getting sick, so I consider that pretty reasonable adherence to plan. Once we got things…

My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade. She said feel free to poke ahead and when I did, within eyesight of her I found a panel of ancient fossilized ripple marks on a boulder half the size of our house. The way the boulder landed when it fell from surrounding cliffs, what was once flat was like a painting on a wall, 90 degrees to what is currently…

This will officially be marked as post no. 100 for my first ever #100DaysToOffload challenge! 🎉 I can’t believe I made it with around 80 days to spare. If I recall correctly, this was the first blogging challenge I participated, and to be fair, it was ambitious of me to take it up as it sounded like an impossible task at the time. I wasn’t confident I could complete it in time. Internet Home Status⁠§In my mind, accomplishing the challenge feels like I’ve broken a barrier to posting regularly on…

I recently bought my wife a new Kindle so I grabbed her old one to sign into my account. I put my username and password in, then it would ask for my 2FA code which I would enter and it would always go back to the sign in screen again. I did this thrice before moving onto other fixes. I tried all the usual troubleshooting like updating it, checking the time and date was correct, and nothing worked. Then I recalled my old Xbox not being able to sign in if 2FA was on I turned it off and it worked.…

This book wasn’t what I was expecting at all. It was listed as fiction on NetGalley but feels much more like non-fiction, although I can understand why the author and publisher could be hesitant to describe it that way as there is a lot of imagination involved! Regardless of the label, I found it absolutely fascinating. Kate Grenville begins by describing a visit she made to the NSW State Archives to research her mother’s life. During this visit she came across a file relating to Currabubula…

I had some idea that I’d wait until after the beginning of November to write here, but I don’t want to do any before/after nonsense. Expect this to be a bit more ramble-y than my usual amount of rambling, and maybe shorter than I’m intending. It’s finally cool outside, which is no doubt a significant […]

Not a bad day but a bit nippy. Poor old Jack cremated this a.m. Cleaned bike and adjusted the clutch. Put the clocks back tonight.