As part of my intermittent engagement with Weird Web October, this year, I'd like to share with you my entry for day 23: incognito: I've made... Incognito Mode for Wikipedia! Kind of. I can't promise it'll do anything for your privacy online. That's just not how this particular "incognito mode" works. 🤣 As usual, the source code's right there for you to do with as you please. For this one, I especially enjoyed getting all of the CSS animations to line-up nicely (they're all CSS... in fact I'm…

Let’s pretend everything is fine with some light m/m smut.

Today’s recording starts with the end of Dennis the Menace. There’s a trail for Live ‘n’ Deadly. There’s some Iain and Dodge nonsense (three helpings today). Then it’s What’s New Scooby-Doo? – Go West Young Scoob. In this episode, the Scooby gang are literally visiting Westworld. A Western-themed town where everyone is a robot. Their train carriage is held up by some bandits, but Fred soon takes them down. Only they were robots, and part of the “attractions”. They’re greeted by Dr Freg, the…

Alex Pasternak records and releases music under a number of often collaborative aliases – Saidera, Dr. Bronzer, Florecer, for example – but as far as I know “Offshore”, is the first full album length set focused on sounds generated solo with his guitar(s). You can date the Californian’s musical output back to the turn of the millennium when he was in hardcore outfit The Fire Next Time, alongside “superstar” DJ Steve Aoki. Pasternak has been working on his 6-string dexterity for decades, and it…

Tom Williams, Information Age: Apple has been ordered to open its “walled garden” to allow third-party app stores and alternative in-app payment systems in Australia, in a landmark court decision which the technology giant says it will appeal. Apple has until at least March 2027 to allow Australian users to download apps through alternative app stores, including direct web downloads, Federal Court Justice Jonathan Beach ruled on Thursday. Lex Friedman: Apple is building third-party app store…

Jasper Johns, Flag from Lead Reliefs, 1969, GEL proof from an ed. 60+10AP, collection NGA Rummaging around through the remnants of Gemini GEL’s archive at the NGA, I got caught up by—surprise, surprise—this Jasper Johns Flag, the best from the 1969 Lead Reliefs series. This example entered the NGA’s collection early, in 1981, directly from Gemini. So it’s likely to be in the most pristine condition 57 years in existence will allow. If nothing else, it’s among the most carefully tended. They are…

In The Private Key Was Four, I examined how eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates ended up with private keys so weak that one of them was the integer 4. In Trusted Everywhere, Impact Everywhere, I looked at why a failure at a CA serving a small market becomes a problem for every relying party that trusts it, whether or not that relying party ever chose to use the CA. This article is about a third problem, which gets the least attention of the three and is getting worse as AI agents take on…

If you're like me and a bit partial to The Smiths (and dear reader you *should* be like me), this is a bloody great piece on Johnny Marr. Marr is now on the opposite side of the culture war from Morrissey, as he stated clearly at the time of Brexit. We must hope that there are more Marrs than Morrisseys in society, and that they prevail, with or without the Burnham premiership. But we shouldn't forget that for a short while, the angriest and most thrilling guitar band of the 1980s channelled…

StarringGary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hugo Weaving, and Saskia ReevesOverviewMI5's most unruly spies are back and under attack.Follow a dysfunctional team of MI5 agents—and their obnoxious boss, the notorious Jackson Lamb—as they navigate the espionage world's smoke and mirrors to defend England from sinister forces.Review Slow Horses That was quite an intense finale! I like that this show is always filming a season ahead and hope it never ends. It’s equal parts intense spy…

Hi, Bear Bloggers! Almost three months ago, I announced I was leaving Bear Blog because I didn't feel I got enough out of the (time) investment of blogging. Since then, I did publish three more short posts: one after an invitation one to express my frustration one as a commemoration I must admit: I've missed writing. Blogging. Yes, it's disappointing to spend many hours writing and polishing something, only to have relatively few people read it. But I also realized that writing down my thoughts…

Did my first HIIT workout in months. Just 10 minutes and I’m covered in sweat.

When I first thought to write about this topic, I considered asking whether or not someone's consumption habits could be considered a political identity, and realized that the answer is so obviously YES that there was no point in debating the question in a blog post. So instead, I'm going to unpack what "consumption as a political identity" means. Our economy (GDP specifically) is expected to grow without pause. This both does and does not make sense. If people keep having families and the…

Et in Arcadia ego… Walking back from lunch yesterday I looked over the bridge and saw this. The weather currently is what used to be called an “Indian Summer”, possibly by people who had never been in India in the summer. Quote of the Day ”You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Leon Trotsky Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Leonard Cohen | Hallelujah, arr. Tom Hodge | Sheku Kanneh-Mason Link Long Read of the Day Too Big to Nationalize A really powerful…

Book title: Every Day Is for the Thief Author: Teju Cole Rating: 3.5/5 This is a fascinating book for two reasons. First, it reads like a travelogue written by the author himself, but it's actually a work of fiction. It's convincingly autobiographical that I wonder how much of it really happened. Second, it offers a glimpse into a country I'll probably never visit and a culture I know next to nothing about. Cole is a good writer. The book does feel a little dated, considering how many new…

After RuboCop spelling checks for Ruby and Dylint spelling checks for Rust, here’s the version that doesn’t require either language’s toolchain. Introducing markdownlint-rule-spellcheck, a custom markdownlint rule powered by CSpell. Released 0.1.0 checks Markdown prose, suggests corrections, and ships American English through its dependencies. No separate dictionary download or system spelling package is required. Getting Started Requires Node.js 22.18 or later. Install the rule and the…

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours The rain is falling on Spitalfields, upon the church and the market, and on the streets, yards and gardens. Dripping off the roofs and splashing onto the pavements, filling the gutters and coursing down the pipes, it overflows the culverts and drains to restore the flow of the Black Ditch, the notorious lost river of Spitalfields that once flowed from here to Limehouse Dock. This was the watercourse that transmitted the cholera in 1832. An open…

Sunday we went to Sekiya Express Spaghetti and were in time for their breakfast servicefor the price of your spaghetti, they give you a free salad!the salad is so huge too! I loved the dressing, it was creamy, a little puckery but also a little sweetI got the regular sized miso meat, which I've tried in the past...this is a huge portion too...300 grams of spaghetti!Satoshi had the shoyu basilico

Automation is not new in software development. We’ve been automating parts of our process for decades - build pipelines, testing, deployments. With AI, we’re now able to automate work that previously required humans with specialised skills to do by hand - specifically, the writing of the code. In other words, AI is enabling us to automate a larger portion of the job that software engineers used to do themselves. This post is a companion to my opening keynote at Agentic Engineering Day in…

The last harvest of the Runner Beans is the dried out pods containing next year's seed.

Aaahh, Essen-Thursday! The day when the gates finally officially open to SPIEL and thousands and thousands of gamers are let loose on the various deals to be had. If you haven’t been to SPIEL, imagine the running of the bulls but more as brisk walking than running, with no serious injuries, and minus the bulls of course. But lets rewind … My day started with grabbing a “Mettbrötchen” (with fresh onions of course) at a local bakery and then waiting outside until the press was allowed in. Things…

The Links Page is Back My massive Links page is back online. It's newly updated and reorganized. I'm still part of the Wayward Webring which will help you find other people online who curate large Link pages, so if you are looking for something new to read, check it out. KI MMA Scott Coker, the man behind Strikeforce and Bellator's success is coming back to MMA with a new promotion called KI MMA. The early press snippets sound good: MMA in a ring, international rules are being proposed,…

A disused parking lot attendant’s booth in Downtown Fort Worth. The post Cowtown Parking appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

POUL ANDERSON “Third Stage.” First published in Amazing Stories, February 1962. Reprinted in Space Pioneers, edited by Hank Davis & Christopher Ruocchio (Baen, paperback, 2018). Included in several collection of Anderson’s work. When this gripping tale of misadventure in the space program in the US in 1962, the aforementioned space program had not been around for very long – a fact you should keep well in mind while reading it today. Two man are in a their small cabin in soace (the third stage)…

Queer actors turning playwright seem to be having a moment, and after the mixed bag of his debut BLACK SUPERHERO Danny Lee Wynter follows it up with a major step up that suggests he's as much of a natural writer as Jack Holden and Jordan Luke Gage. The titular character of the semi-autobiographical Ilford Boy is 14-year-old Ted (Leo Whitfield Harris,) who lives in East London in the middle of a multicultural family. It's 1996 and he and his mum Tillie (Ria Zmitrowicz) have been staying at the…

One of the private keys behind eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates was the integer 4. Several other keys in the same set were nearly as easy to recover. Keys capable of supporting trusted TLS issuance made it through key generation, certification, auditing, and root program review before an outside researcher noticed, and the previous article examined how that happened. This article asks why a failure at an Indian CA became an incident response problem for relying parties around the…

Episode Synopsis Paul and Dusey ask and answer: is player agency always sacrosanct? Should every new roleplayer start in a dungeon? Did Tolkien know how to name women and did he care? And why everything in every game, table and session is a trade-off. Plus talk about The Slow Knife and Urban Shadows. Weird Terminology and Acronyms Bleed: The spillover of emotions between character and player. DungeonTube: The ecosystem of YouTube creators who make videos about D&D and other RPGs.…

Today is the 25th anniversary of my weblog. Hooray! It’s been a long time on the Internet and a lot has changed. But some of the sites I linked in that first month are still around, like the Half Bakery and urinal.net. There’s a funny update on the EA / Ultima story. I’m still around too! I don’t blog as much as I do, no one blogs like they used to. I have more places to publish now. I write short posts on Fedi. Links are now shared on my linkblog. Casual tech posts go to my secret work blog.…

Über sieben – oder acht – neue Brücken werden Radfahrer in Bochum zukünftig fahren können – irgendwann, vielleicht. Eins: Die neue Brücke der Lothringen-Trasse über die A43 in Hiltrop Die neue Brücke steht schon, aber die Fernwärmeleitungen müssen noch verlegt werden. „Der Radweg wird als letztes verlegt, weil zunächst die Fernwärmeleitungen montiert werden“, sagt Tobias Fabri, Projektleiter der Stadtwerke. Im Oktober 2027 soll die neue Bücke freigegeben werden. Bis dahin steht die alte Brücke…

Finally got around to checking out one of the Northwest Trolls, this one nearby in Oregon, with most being up in Washington state. I love how these look in person and now I want to see them all.Then I headed up to the Japanese Garden to see how the Fall color was coming along. The famous tree looks like it already lost most of its leaves before the whole gardens have turned but here are some color highlights.