Jessica Clark in Dolly, Omnibus Theatre. Photo: Carla Joy Evans Dolly at the Omnibus Theatre is not always an easy watch; it references many incidents from the uncomfortable to the downright terrifying that women endure at the hands of men. The sad fact is that there will likely be something that is familiar to every woman in the audience. We first meet Dolly (Jessica Clark) when she is doing stand up. She uses crowd work to set the scene and launch into the story of what happened at her other…

The Arc Browser will go away by December, as the company behind it will pursue their AI-first browser. I like the Chromium based Arc browser, as it moves its UI out of my sight when I don’t interact with it, and has its tabs to the side. I’ve been using Arc for some years since 2023. Last December it was announced they would not develop it further, and now it’s clear a year on it will disappear. A colleague pointed me to the Zen browser last March, which takes inspiration from Arc’s UI, and I…

Flawed characters, egos galore, relationships that feel real, and some stellar writing and acting, safe to say I enjoyed every minute of The Diplomat. Late to the party I binged watched my way through all 4 seasons over the last couple of weeks. It’s the first TV show NOT on Apple TV I’ve watched for a while but I’d heard good things. A political drama based in deep character work, the usual suspension of disbelief still applies but there wasn’t anything too out there to make me cringe. Instead…

I’m writing to you from a Tim Horton’s in Birmingham city centre where I have just hesitated over buying a medium or a large coffee because there was 75p in the difference. But the reason I’m here at 06:30 on a Friday is that I’ve just queued outside the Apple Store for the new iPhone Duo which costs so much that I cannot, just cannot bring myself to type the figure. What I’d rather do is tell you that as silly as I felt heading for the store, it was fun. Standing in the rain with about 30…

so this is a little sad, but joining my partner on a slow day yesterday sucked for me, even though they had the perfect time, exactly what they needed. we had few "together" activities, i didn't have to join them, i could have done whatever i wanted, but i fell into the story of it being a luxurious treat i wanted to partake in. alas... i did plenty of things i liked, including a very interesting guided meditation combined with tarot reading, so i got to dabble in my special interest. cooked a…

On September 12 the water at Burntcoat Head, Nova Scotia, rose 48 feet in six hours. It was the biggest tide of the year, in the bay with the biggest tides on Earth. I put NOAA’s model of the Bay of Fundy on a map: the water level and the current, hour by hour. That one flood tide pushed more than 100 billion tons of seawater into the bay. At its peak that’s almost six times the flow of every river on Earth combined, and a lot of it squeezes through Minas Passage at 11 miles an hour. The…

Reading Time: 35 minutes I went to Thorpe Park on Monday with a godchild of mine – Thorpe Park is great, rollercoasters are ace, etc etc, but my main takeaway from the day was ‘wow are there an awful lot of young people in 2026 who have taken early-00s ‘Fred Durst’ as their fashion inspiration’ (that and “I refuse to believe System Of A Down are as popular as all these hoodies would suggest”). Anyway, today’s Web Curios is going to be light on introduction because I am once again Catford bound…

The Guardian: Hackers have forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50C overnight, in an “unprecedented” cyber-attack affecting several hundred stores across the country, with fires and food losses reported. That's 122° F. The affected units “were running outdated firmware”, Danfoss said, adding that it had “long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions”. Most…

What came to help came with talons, and the one who called it put a hand up in alarm. Nothing obliges a rescue to resemble the one in need from inside the life raft.

There is something quite comforting about a meal that combines two family favourites into one delicious dish. This Meat Loaf Pie does exactly that, bringing together a tender, flavourful meatloaf base with a rich topping of tangy ketchup glaze, sharp cheddar cheese and smoky bacon. Its simple home cooking at it's very best.Perfect for busy weeknight suppers, cozy weekend dinners, or whenever you're craving hearty comfort food. This Vintage-inspired recipe has been a family favourite for many…

One of the hardest thing in photography isn’t to learn how to use the camera or define your vision. It’s learning to trust your judgment when nobody is around to help you. This woman walked right in front of me as I was taking my photo to take hers I started photography in the early-ish internet. The place was very different from what it is now. Forums were the main form of mass communication (IRC doesn’t really count, it was too specialised), people gave constructive feedback, and nobody was…

Timestral is Mistral’s new family of models for forecasting time series. Give it a sequence of numbers, such as daily sales or electricity demand, and it predicts what comes next. It also produces a range of possible values, so we can ask how uncertain the forecast is. The family runs from 5 million to 209 million parameters and supports multiple related series and extra inputs. We were interested in the 28-million-parameter version: small enough to run locally, and already trained across other…

Hillingdon has a new museum. They kept that quiet. Obviously they didn't keep it that quiet, they even wrote MUSEUM in large illuminated letters outside the entrance to the new library in the Civic Centre. They also announced the opening last December in the borough newsletter and the Hillingdon Times ran a news story, but I guess I live far enough away to have completely missed that. It's part of a cost-cutting project to co-locate as many council services as possible in the Civic Centre…

We are thinking of making the entire Q&A tomorrow about polls. So, if readers have polling questions, either in general, or about the polls this year, please send them to comments@electoral-vote.com. We will see if we get enough. Polling, Part I: Another Pollster Goes Up in Smoke Earlier this week, FiftyPlusOne outed Wedgewood Polls as a fraud. Yesterday, FiftyPlusOne, with an assist from The Washington Post, effectively outed SoCal Strategies as another fraud. Not a good week for faith in…

A song from the first gig you went to. I was 15. A friend was going and I tagged along. All the way into the city, a night away from our provincial town, the bright lights, loud music, the band almost didn’t matter. 8th August 1989, Glasgow and the band were still riding the high of a recent number on single (Belfast Child) and I’d been on my usual album dive into their back catalogue. And as a first gig it was pretty good, from what I remember. Support act The Silencers went on to become a…

Let’s eradicate our life support systems – that’ll teach the liberals! By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd October 2026 However grim the trajectory might seem, I’ve always believed that sense will ultimately prevail. As the great perils of dismantling the living world become increasingly obvious, even the most rapacious exploiters must come round. Nobody wants to live on a dead planet, do they? There are – or were – signs that this wasn’t just wishful thinking. Since 2015, mostly…

We are delighted to showcase as a guest post this richly interesting and and remarkably useful guide to the BBC drama series Centre Play by our friend and television scholar Billy Smart (who himself blogs here). Our thanks to him for permitting us to share more widely his reflections that were originally compiled for a group of friends and colleagues. We very much hope he will contribute other posts that draw on his extraordinarily extensive viewing and deep understanding of the history of…

I really like writing while on a train journey, and this article about a crazy train trip project in Japan is inspiring. Japan Today. #WritingLife #Japan #productivity

Here we go again: “Russian disinformation campaign targets pro-Ukraine candidates ahead of midterms, lawmakers say.” kyivindependent.com/russian-d… #QuidProQuo #MuscovianCandidate #RussiaIsATerroristState

On 17th October, eight eMudhra intermediate CAs chaining to emSign ECC Root CA - G3 were found to have trivially recoverable private keys. They were revoked the next day, and Mozilla and Chrome are now distrusting the G3 root. Separately, on 19th October eMudhra revoked 9,356 certificates on its unaffected RSA hierarchy (emSign Root CA - G1) with the reason “Superseded”. That batch matches every unexpired certificate missing a certificate-type policy OID required by emSign’s own CP/CPS (Bug…

This blog has been around for more than twenty years and I could easily devote the next twenty to replying to the complaints I often receive. Some are deserved. I appreciate readers who correct errors of fact, point out typos and suggest alternatives to stylistic infelicities or misused words. Such replies to posts are encouraged, especially if they are given politely and respectfully. Less helpful are ad hominem attacks (Racist! Sexist! Fascist!) and complaints rooted in fashionable politics.…

Meh. I appreciated the lack of jump scares, and I liked the location very much… But the tension did not fully get to me. Rating: 🫤Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

Iceland Airwaves, 2025. I was in Iðno, hiding in a corner next to to the PA subwoofer—my usual hangout for taking pictures of the performers. A woman of indeterminate age came swooping into my lair emanating a cloud of perfume and alcohol. She started talking to me, something about the next act, as she deposited her fur coat behind the speaker. She was coming on strong and was definitely

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% […]

I recently had my first camping trip of the season: two nights roughing it in the Texas Hill Country. I visited Lost Maples State Natural Area and Garner State Park, some of the most popular administrated areas in the state of Texas. And while I was lost in the rocky topography, I took many pictures. We stayed at a quiet HipCamp roughly equidistant between our two destinations. I wrote about the camp cat that made this place extra special. The grounds were excellent, well-maintained, and safe.…

I freaking LOVE keyboard shortcuts because I’m lazy they’re so efficient and a little effort to build muscle memory pays off big time… until it doesn’t! I learned computing on Windows so I learned the basic text cut, copy, paste and ctrl+arrows to move words at a time, adding shift to select text, closing tabs and windows, etc. But that was not super helpful when I started using the command line, in fact using those shortcuts made “bad” things happen. This got even worse when I had to use vi.…

Mortality Among People With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis ADHD was associated with increased mortality across multiple causes; and ADHD medication was associated with a decreased all-cause mortality risk Seeking treatment was the best thing I’ve ever done. I wish I’d started decades earlier.

Testing out a self-hosted VaultWarden after years of KeePassXC… Cool, but still skeptical. It was very easy to set up, but I think, “What if there’s no internet connection?” Well, there probably wouldn’t be any websites to log in to, either… Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

💡Go read The Devil You Know now!Do you think you’d be good at convincing others to sell their soul to the devil?I am not a good sales person. If I were, I would probably be better at marketing my novels. I think there are telemarketers and people who have jobs they do for a living who would be better at this than I am.Given all the deals she has made throughout the course of these stories, is Joyce maybe a bit too confident in her ability to make a deal?I think Joyce is a bit too confident in…

Heading into the homestretch here, and I like doing more double features. Just like being at the old 67 Drive-in! For tonight’s double feature I am going back to my college days with a pair of slashers set in sorority houses, namely 1982’s The House on Sorority Row and the 1986's Sorority House Massacre.They are not subtle films by any means; honestly, they are just excuses to have college girls run around in various stages of undress, but both have ideas I can get behind, especially for my own…