Every meal you add to Snapkin goes through a lot of work on the server: resizing the photos, looking for barcodes and QR codes, preparing everything for the AI call, … Most of that is hard to make faster. So I moved the one part I could move: when the photos leave the phone.

I’m sometimes told I’m a bit of an elitist. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I always respond with that living in North-Western Europe kind of berefts me of a choice in the matter. Were I the poorest person in the Netherlands, I would still belong to the richest 10% of the world. Or so I’m told. There are different kinds of elitism, however. Reading paper magazines and newspapers, for instance, not out of nostalgia but because one just likes is, can be seen as such, simply because not many…

There is something wonderfully comforting about a simple lemon cake, and this Lemon Curd Glazed Pound Cake delivers everything a lemon lover could want. Rich and buttery with a moist, tender crumb, it's infused with fresh lemon zest and juice, then finished with a glossy coating of tangy lemon curd that soaks into the warm cake.Easy to make and bursting with bright citrus flavours, this old-fashioned cake is perfect for afternoon tea, weekend baking, or whenever you're craving a little slice of…

One-word street names are unusual but not entirely uncommon. Two-word street names are definitely the norm. Three-word street names are all over the place. But four-word street names are rare. Here are a few: SCOTLAND GREEN ROAD NORTH, ADAM AND EVE COURT, DUKE OF YORK STREET, HAUNCH OF VENISON YARD, HYDE PARK GARDENS MEWS, LITTLE ST JAMES'S STREET, STOKE NEWINGTON CHURCH STREET, SAINT MARTIN-THE-FIELDS CHURCH PATH And five-word street names, or longer, are even rarer. (no photo) I wondered how…

Wedgewood Polls has been unmasked as a fake operation. From their website, it was clear they were not a political consultant. And The New York Times used 15 of their polls, so we were in good company being fooled. We have deleted all their polls from our database. This may have been just a prank since their polls are all in line with major pollsters and mostly show Democrats ahead in states where other pollsters also show them to be ahead—and by roughly the same margins as the others. The map…

Today I got a strange email that turned into an unsettling phishing experiences. // If you’re just here to read about how bad passkeys are, skip to part 4 It Started With a YouTube Support Ticket I thought someone from Russia created a support ticket with YouTube to take over my gmail account and I needed to click on their link to reject the support ticket. Oops. The Google Login Page Looked almost Legit But I was already logged into Google in another browser tab. So why was Google asking me to…

Crawley2026 October 22 (Thursday), 1:47PM· UWA · Swan River · We went for a bit of a wander along the beach at Pelican Point, pausing to have morning tea with the Swan Estuary Reserves Action Group (and to create their Wikidata item), and then to Shenton House and to peer at the old photos on the walls of the tavern (none of which are well labelled). [todo – Add photos. Why is the wifi so very slow here?] ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss,…

What’s your favorite protest song? There are many. Powerful, questioning, challenging, songs can almost be a rite of passage for some artists. From What’s Goin’ On to Going Underground, from The Times They Are A’ Changin to Clampdown, Fight the Power to Paper Planes … I could go on. And I am already pondering a new playlist… But for someone of my generation, who was exploring heavy rock music in his youth and who, as a 19 year old, was starting to view the world with an increasingly cynical…

Journey into Danger United KingdomICL (developer and publisher) Released 1981 for ZX81, 1982 for ZX SpectrumRejected for: No character development Journey into Danger is a simple proto-RPG released as part of ICL's Super Programs 6. It has no backstory, no character creation, no character development, no attributes, no tactics, and no goal other than to earn points. I just earned points. The player character (an asterisk) is released into a single-screen maze with a clearly marked entrance and…

Good morning everyone! It’s actually Thursday as a write this since Wednesday was so packed for me that I opted for some early morning blogging (it’s 5:45 AM as I write this) rather than to add to my already considerable lack of sleep going into SPIEL this year. But I had a great start! It was all over in a flash and I actually have to go through the pics and audio clips I recorded to reconstruct what happened. So tag along and have fun! Press Conference Since the SPIEL team was once again so…

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“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.” Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the…

Perfume PosseTabac Sahara by Guerlain Absolus Allegoria 2026 Hey Crew, I might have blind bought myself a bottle of Tabac Sahara when I grabbed L’Heure Bleue 2026. It was a good deal from overseas and I think I got free shipping for spending that amount. They arrived about… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseTabac Sahara by Guerlain Absolus Allegoria 2026

A busy afternoon, with eight members turning out. No photos, I’m afraid – two days solid wallpapering and a dodgy tummy left me sitting out the afternoon in a comfortable chair. (Before moving sofas with Allan in the evening!) But here are two photos. John Alsop’s photo of the West London Line before passenger services were withdrawn. And again from John Alsop’s collection, a troop train unloads on the LSWR at Okehampton in 1912. LSW · Okehampton · Devon Closed 1972 · Okehampton. [military…

Thursday 22nd October 2026 Following Tuesday’s blog highlighting Kent Country’s expansion, this time I’m taking a look at how Newport Bus has expanded over the years to become a significant player in Monmouthshire and, more recently Herefordshire, many miles from its city based heartland in Newport. The company operates what it calls a Regional Network with its website helpfully displaying a route map showing how coverage now stretches from Hereford, Monmouth, Abergavenny and Pontypool north of…

In the mid-‘90s, I finally got serious about the bass. I’d been farting around with a Hofner copy. Ridiculous thing. Piece of junk. Probably had a pretty bad something or other here or there, but I had a group of guys forming a band, the old post-college band, and I needed something. My first bass love was my friend Chad’s blue 4001 fretless with googly eyes all over it. A Rickenbacker, of course, and just the coolest. So that was always in the back of my mind. Well, I was waiting tables and…

My great-grandfather was killed by a defragmentation grenade. They never found his body. It happened just as the Russians started winning against the Germans on the Eastern front. During the battle of Rusalka, his infantry group’s gunfire dislodged the enemy from their position. As the Germans retreated, one soldier hurled a defragmentation grenade behind him. A parting gift. There was a red flash as the outer casing shattered and the chemicals mixed. Defragmentation weapons are one of those…

Every picture tells a story. In this case it was hammering down, I had lost the bankstick for my camera and I'd landed a monster pike. Balanced my wet camera on a rock and a couple of terrible photos. Madman fishing in horrible weather, soaked through - but a fantastic 26lb 1oz pike hit my battered SG lure. A new lure PB, just 4 days after beating my bait PB - a rather splendid few days fishing!

After adding spelling checks to RuboCop, I wanted the same thing for Rust. Introducing dylint-spellcheck, a Dylint library for checking spelling in Rust comments, Rustdoc attributes, Markdown, and plain text. It uses the Rust implementation of Kotoshu and ships an American English dictionary. The idea is the same as the Ruby version: fix actual typos, accept project-specific vocabulary, and run spelling alongside the other lint checks. Getting Started The examples below use released 0.1.0.…

Stopped writing PHP for 20 years. Bought an app last year that runs on PHP. Of course, the worst PHP security hole in a long time is discovered shortly after 😅

Out in Birmingham last week, I found myself tram spotting while waiting to go into the town hall. This is the section of the line where the trams run on battery power to avoid having to install overhead wires. For modellers of the modern scene, this is a gift. The hardest part of any tramway build is the knitting in the sky. Now we can just pretend that the model shows a battery section - job done!It also occurred to me that it's been a long while since I've ridden Brum trams, and the only…

Red clouds at dawn, along the Katsura River in Arashiyama. 嵐山の桂川沿いで、夜明けの茜色の雲。

The PHP Foundation in a blog post titled, "Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security": This post isn't about how to update. It's about how these vulnerabilities were found and fixed, what has changed in how PHP security is handled over the past two years, and what we need from the organizations that depend on PHP to keep PHP's security work going. They provide a lot of details about the history of these vulnerabilities and the timeline leading up to exploration and…

I sneezed in an audio call with my @openai.com Dot today, and then I kept talking. It interjected with "bless you" while it continued to listen to me ramble. I mentally registered that this was a delightful little design detail, but it only just now occurred to me that it's not obvious whether this was a hard-coded feature (or system prompt), or a legitimately non-deterministic response from a multimodal model. Fascinating! 🧠

I received a pretty cool little surprise for my birthday: A Tubbz Mystery Egg. I've had a Jeep for a couple years now and while my dashboard isn't covered with ducks, I do have a few in a little tray and in a little net bag inside. I received this guy as a little extra gift probably more for my love of the classic Universal Monsters than because it's a duck. These guys are blind bagged, which I'm not a huge fan of, so I'm not sure I'll go out and attempt to snag any more, though you know I…

Something wicked this way comes in Commando issues 6003-6006 out today, Thursday 22nd October! Commando does Halloween in four spooky comics, featuring everything from haunted aircraft to Soviet cannibals! Don’t miss out!6003: H-FOR-HAUNTEDFlak, Luftwaffe Night Fighters, mechanical failures… The Lancaster crews of the 281 Pathfinder Squadron had more than enough to contend with without adding a

My friend Chris died last year. He quietly suffered from mental illness for a long time but took great care to ensure everybody around him felt good, felt happy, and never worried about him. Most people didn’t know because his first concern was always how you were feeling, not him. I spoke to Chris three or four times a week in the year leading up his passing and I could tell he was in terrible anguish sometimes, and had been for a while. I really hope and think he’s finally found relief……

Dokkoi is a family business from Japan which makes boardgame accessories. They were at TOBE 2026 in Taipei, and I got this set of component trays from Kotaro-san as a gift. He's an amazing guy. He speaks both English and Chinese, and he learned to speak Chinese by himself when in Japan. This is a set of six trays The material is a soft rubber, so the

I've really wanted to write lately. This doesn't mean I have written, but I've certainly wanted to. But I have written. Some of it goes here, some of it goes to the Rocker Step, some of it goes to a secret third place. It's the ideas that are getting stuck. Tonight, a thing that unstuck me happened while I was chatting with basketball essayist Omar Zahran. We were talking about a vaguely homophobic thing we'd seen online and within a few minutes I was typing a mile a minute about how sad it is…