Although I do most of my reading on my Kindle, there’s something I love about visiting bookstores - it’s a lot of fun just browsing the covers and seeing what pops out at you. Lately I’ve found myself wanting to start reading physical books again too, so I’ve started building up a small collection in my Tokyo apartment. Unfortunately English-language bookstores are limited in Tokyo, and I thought Kinokuniya would be my only option - but I was surprised that there are actually a couple of other…

Do you remember the World's Most Notable People Map. On Monday, I decided I'd build a World's Most Notable Places Map, showing locations based on their Wikipedia QRank. I abandoned the project today after discovering the Wikipedia Importance Map.Earlier this month, Wikimedia Enterprise released the Geospatial Wikidata Databset.. This is a large, open dataset that connects geographic features in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with information held in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.The idea behind the…

1912 mystery/adventure anthology, including the stories of Thorpe Hazell, the Railway Detective.

Latest links… We may think that we lose something significant when AI beats us to a discovery — if we do, Daniel Greco says, that seems to imply we gained something significant, too “Once upon a time there were a couple of handsome naturalistic philosophers working in and around the philosophy of fiction” — thoughts on new directions in philosophy of fiction, from several philosophers What is the debate over whether transwomen are women even about? — Katie Zhou argues that it’s about which…

CLONE COMMANDER CODY (Utapau) The Vintage Collection 3 3/4-Inch Walmart Exclusive 2-Pack Item No.: No. G3192 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: #413 Includes: Blaster rifles, removable jet pack Action Feature: n/a Retail: $39.99 Availability: August 2026 Appearances: Revenge of the Sith Bio: On Clone Commander Cody's orders, the 212th battalion's specially trained clone paratroopers searched - to no avail - for their missing former commander, Obi-Wan Kenobi. (Taken from the cardback.) Image: Adam's…

Private keys for eight eMudhra intermediate Certificate Authority (CA) certificates have been compromised, making it trivial for attackers to forge certificates that would be trusted by unpatched roots of trust. Six of the impacted certificates were for Transport Layer Security (TLS) and trusted by the Apple, Chrome, Microsoft and Mozilla root programs. The other two certificates were for codesigning and trusted by Microsoft. Browsers were able to block the affected intermediate CAs using their…

Big kid has taken to writing me rather formal letters in the mornings this week. Usually I’m up with him making breakfasts and little kid’s packed lunch for school, but the little one’s off on an extended half-term this week while the big one breaks up tomorrow. So this week I’m mostly getting a little lie in every day. The letters are effectively handwritten micro blogs of his unusual mornings with his mum and brother.

When I too thought Elon the 21st century equivalent of Einstein and Edison jelly rolled into one! There's just no stopping this guy's sheer, unadulterated genius!!!Then the sheen started to slowly, then rapidly dissipate. His beautiful Model 2 Roadster of 2017 with specs up the wazoo was promised to go into mass production in 2020, make that 2021, 2022- do I hear 2023, 2024? Certainly 2025... Hey, check out the all new, redesigned 2026 with- Rocket Boosters!!! Scheduled for delivery in... in...…

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to…

Our Little Corner of the World: Music from Gilmore Girls is a 2002 soundtrack release from Rhino Records for The WB's Gilmore Girls. The album is a combination of selections from the score composed by Sam Phillips and the music of other musicians heard, mostly, during the first two seasons of the show. Also included on the album is the new version of "Where You Lead" by Carole King and her daughter Louise Goffin, a snippet of which serves as the theme song for the show.In her review of the…

I'm so glad that we still have the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland - a classic attraction if ever there was one. I didn't visit it during my last visit, but I forget why. I think it was down for maintenance. Next time for sure! The outdoor courtyard has a fun pre-show, in which guests meet some of the more prominent tiki gods. Maui, Koro, Rongo, Tangaroa, and more. Vintage photos of these deities are not common, but it seems as if Pele, "goddess of fire and volcanoes", show up more than most.…

Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)

The needleworkers who created the America's Tapestry panel for the colony of New Hampshire for the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War want me to share this exciting news! They are searching for descendants of the patriots depicted on their tapestry. These men are John Langdon, Steven Batson, Samuel Cutts, Henry Langmead, Jude Hall, John Sullivan, and Alexander Scammell. If you are a descendant please email the Millyard Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire. They are organizing a…

Today’s chapter of The Tale of Genji is a pivotal one, bringing a part of the story to a close while teasing at what’s still to come, but in many ways it feels like a celebration, with everything coming together for Genji, his children and even some of his women. Come with me, then, as we pay one final visit to the Rokujō Estate for now, where we’ll be welcoming some special guests to round the section off – it’s going to be a *very* special day ***** In the previous chapter, ‘Umegae’, we saw…

As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve very much distracted by all sorts of book recommendations turning up on my Instagram feed. One particular title which kept appearing was one which I’d been vaguely aware of for a little while, and that’s the Penguin Classics edition of “Madonna in a Fur Coat” by Sabahattin Ali (translated here by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe). Both book and author were completely new to me when they appeared in my line of sight, but I confess I was intrigued. So when I…

I spent quite a bit of September reading two fairly long books, Race of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett and This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, both of which I enjoyed but did not finish until October. International Dorothy Dunnett Day is celebrated annually on the Saturday closest to November 9 (the anniversary of Scottish historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett's death). Fans around the world gather in various places and toast her at 1 pm local time with whisky. The Boston group will be…

I had some thoughts about bubbles last week, and that post had some impact. /2026/10/impact.png For example, you might notice that posts on Top are no longer only a couple of days old. This is because Ben adjusted the algorithm to ignore the age of the post. In theory, this sounds good. Why should a post get penalized just because it's old? However, it does feel weird for a post that is 200 days old to appear on Top. I think it's because we are so conditioned that the algorithm always provides…

A patch-set that removes more code than it adds is always much appreciated. Code that doesn’t exist cannot have bugs after all! KWin, our fantastic Wayland compositor and window manager, like many others, has an Alt+Tab switcher (“tabbox”) for quickly cycling between windows. Of course having been created by KDE, there’s plenty of options for how it should behave and what it should look like. It was the fashion at the time… A while ago I noticed that the preview feature in System Settings…

Nebula's app lets you download videos for offline viewing, which is fine on a phone or tablet. I wanted to watch some offline on my laptop though yt-dlp can do this for you. yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox "https://nebula.tv/videos/SLUG" --cookies-from-browser firefox reads Firefox's cookies.sqlite directly. As long as you're logged into Nebula in Firefox, yt-dlp authenticates as you. That works for any site that needs a login, not just Nebula. Find your profile location Auto-detection…

Book 3 of the Sun Eater series follow Hadrian as he tries to play politics so he can figure out what the Quiet really is. He already knows that the AI systems built by old Earth scientists could communicate with beings in other dimensions and across time, but he needs more information and access to the secret parts of the Imperial Library to see if the are records that are now banned after the AI wars. Hadrian encounters the Quiet in a deeper way and they change him so that he can see quantum…

You find the role one evening after work. It reads like someone wrote it with you in mind.You spend an hour on the cover note, tweak the CV and press submit at six.By eight there is an email waiting. "After careful consideration, we have decided not to move forward."Nobody considered anything carefully in two hours.The story almost writes itself: a piece of software scanned your CV, didn't find the right words and filed you under no.Most of the advice online agrees, and offers to sell you a…

I’ve been bemusedly reading and watching several iPhone Duo reviews over the past day or so (besides John’s piece, The Verge has a series of excellent pieces and a thorough video review), and the consensus seems to be that it’s a polished, chunky prototype that hasn’t really figured out what the user experience should be. Being a Mr. Mobile fan and watching his videos on Android foldables for years now, it comes as no surprise. But it also will come as no surprise that two years down the road…

The album cover of Broder Daniel's Cruel Town. Broder Daniel came from nowhere and changed the Swedish indie landscape when they did: poppy and weird tracks that upset the sensibilities of those usually accustomed to Swedish bands like The Cardigans and Eggstone at the time was a lovely thing and a breath of fresh air. Their first single is 'Cadillac': Obviously, with Henrik Berggren as the front of the band, things could have gone any way. It could perhaps mainly have gone south fairly…

A short journey across the Austrian border becomes a walk through Znojmo’s doors, worn façades, medieval paintings and churches. Along the way: echoes of the monarchy, glass, cherubs and late-afternoon light over the Thaya. The post Just Crossing the Border appeared first on Friedrich Zettl Fine Arts.

The elephant isn’t eaten all at once - instead, bite by bite. Small ‘HiFi-micro’ layouts require a neatness in finish that is achieved through deliberate decisions, such as the order to undertake tasks… In such a small space the make or break element on Defiance will be the inlaid track. Neatness essential. It doesn’t matter what I choose to make it from, but it does require the basic structures to be in place. Basic structures.Basic, not finished. Getting the outlines right means I can now…

How Infiniroot handled the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 without panic

It turns out that level design means "driving around your neighborhood photographing things at the park and the gas station, and then putting them in Dark Radiant". I really enjoy the process of taking pictures and then whacking them onto a level. I can also tell that I am getting a lot better at using these tools! I may eventually go back and replace some of this stuff with models, but using the level editor to make it idiot-style, like I'm building with legos, is a lot of fun. The gas station…

Once again, I need to simplify. From my diet and exercise to how I spend my time, and especially all the little things I do every day that don’t really need doing. I’ve written about this before, many times. I even wrote an entire blog post as a note to self - to do fewer things. It’s always there at the back of my head: I’m doing this, but it doesn’t need to be done. I’m much better than I used to be, though, many years ago (I guess midlife has something to do with it; my time sure does feel…

Once again, I need to simplify. From my diet and exercise to how I spend my time, and especially all the little things I do every day that don’t really need doing. I’ve written about this before, many times. I even wrote an entire blog post as a note to self - to do fewer things. It’s always there at the back of my head: I’m doing this, but it doesn’t need to be done. I’m much better than I used to be, though, many years ago (I guess midlife has something to do with it; my time sure does feel…

The issue Boards place their judgement at the final interview, where it adds least, and treat the brief as clerical work, where it decides most. Why it persists The final read of a candidate feels like the decision, and a confident reading flatters everyone in the room; the brief feels like paperwork, and the board writing it rarely examines itself. What to do Spend judgement on defining what the organisation is and needs, combine the evidence about candidates consistently, and keep ownership…