For the first time ever, I used one of the weird screwdrivers that knock around in your toolbox.

A good day, and a quiet day. Much of it was spent doing some crochet. I got a walk in outside, with lovely weather to enjoy, as well. My daughters got the one garden bed cleaned up and weeded. As usual, the north end of the bed was filled with elm roots. They got two … Continue reading Another good day

Last weekend, L. & I went on a quick journey to Dubuque, IA, which became a tri-state trip due to its proximity to both Illinois and Wisconsin. Our purpose for this trip was two-fold: first, to give L. a symbolic and physical break in between her library assignments; second, to meet up with some online folks, all of whom I haven't seen in many years. I was also looking forward to what I hoped would be a harbinger of autumn, particularly when mixed in with the terrain of the Driftless Area. We…

Marcin Wichary shared a fascinating bit of history: This was a “Speed-Minder” deployed by Illinois State Police in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The car didn’t have a radar, it just reported its own speed, which I thought was clever. I am not even sure if it was as much to prevent drivers going too fast – I guess that’s what the name suggests – or just to help you calibrate your car’s own speedometer. Fascinating! There are a couple more pictures in Marcin's post, but I wanted a few more.…

I'm getting tired of this. Thanks, once again, to the wonderful Fediverse (I use Mastodon), I just learned that eBay automatically opted in all of their users to training their AI with personal data without their consent. You can opt out at this link: https://accountsettings.ebay.com/ai-preferences They're not even trying to respect users anymore. How can we even fight this madness? All of the Big Tech companies are doing this, and so much of our infrastructure, communication, and how we…

I’m surprised to notice that someone updated the goofy IPv8 IETF draft, kicking the dead horse for another 6 months of our amusement.

Due to the recent discovery of an extremely powerful vulnerability in PHP, I had to do baby's first vulnerability solve for some of my self-hosted applications. Over the past year I've gotten quite into self-hosting, and I've talked about it a bit on this blog specifically. I try and maintain a relatively safe network between my various devices, and this was the first time that I was seriously spooked by a public vulnerability. I'm not smart enough to explain exactly what was going on with PHP,…

Finally, Bravo's RHONY is good again! E's The Golden Life, with original RHONY cast members? Not so much. My review of both.

A favorite anchorage.

Meanwhile, in Australia, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will hand down its report on December 18. No, we have not seen the report yet. But it seems there are issues….. To wit…. deep manipulation (and infiltration) of this process by Zionist supporters and the state of Israel,the failure of the Royal Commission to explore, cross-examine and test the evidence of the witnesses and submissions,the failure to acknowledge the part that the IDF’s genocidal acts in Palestine…

Book title: Artificial Condition--The Murderbot Diaries Author: Martha Wells Rating: 4.25/5 Book 41 of the year. This series is fun. I love how idiosyncratic Murderbot is (reminds me of a friend of mine; all he wants is to be left in peace, too, but life keeps happening to him. As far as I know, he has no built-in weapons, though). There's this overarching plot that I'm invested in, and I have no clue where it's heading. But there are like 100 more books in the series, so onwards! Notes &…

Originally published on Rails At Scale. The title was bait to get you to open this article. But fear not! We will be generating code at run-time today. (See the PR for a sneak peek.) Sam popped into the JIT channel asking how we might optimize Rails enums in Roundhouse, motivated by the following code snippet: class Order < ActiveRecord::Base enum :status, { pending: 0, paid: 1, shipped: 2, refunded: 3 } def shippable? paid? && !refunded? end end In particular, there is a lot of dynamic…

Or, IC UC we all C for ICs. In many dynamically typed programming languages, objects look like a big ol’ mapping of names to values. The languages encourage this flexibility. Consider for example Python: class C: def __init__(self): self.a = 1 self.b = 2 Or Ruby: class C def initialize @a = 1 @b = 2 end end Or JavaScript1: let obj = {}; obj.a = 1; obj.b = 2; This might encourage the VM implementor to model object attributes using a hash table. Hash tables, after all, are very good at mapping…

What do we owe one another in our everyday interactions? And why do even brief encounters with strangers matter? In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Kimberley Brownlee, Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy. Her research focuses on loneliness, belonging, social human rights and freedom of association, examining fundamental questions about our social needs and our moral…

In my imagination, Joan Lauder (1924-2011) was a mysterious feline spirit in human form who prowled the alleys and back streets, a self-appointed guardian of the stray cats and a lonely sentinel embodying the melancholy soul of the place. Here are Rodney Archer’s memories with Phil Maxwell’s black and white photos from the eighties and Clive Murphy’s colour pictures from the nineties. One day, when I went round to enjoy a cup of tea and shot of rum with Rodney in his cosy basement kitchen in…

Been wanting to try Dumbo Doughnuts & Coffee for some time now but their main shop is in Azabujuban and we aren't in that area too oftenSo, when I went to Jiyugaoka, I checked out that location instead order at the counter and payI tried their toasted coconut doughnut and iced coffee...950 yen (tax included)Their doughnuts are huge! like 5 or 6 inches across!The texture is airy and a

This week the graph has hardly nmoved, alas. Not because I had another catastrophic week, but because it's a rolling average and changes only make a difference if they are sustained. This is why I use a rolling average: it's very easy for me to ignore overspending by thinking to myself "it's a one-off", "next week will be different", or generally trying to pretend things don't add up. THe graph confronts me with the need to keep pushing. This week's rolling 90 day average spending But pushing I…

It's that time of year again.I always feel some pull to do at least one Halloween post in the spirit of the season, and thankfully there were a rich supply of vintage made-for-TV horror and suspense films to debut in the Comfort TV era. The hardest part is choosing which to highlight. This year let’s look at “Don’t Go to Sleep” from 1982 – or best not to look if you’re easily unsettled. This one will scare you, right up to a final scene that is pure nightmare fuel.Dennis Weaver and Valerie…

I am sitting out the back patio with the ThinkPad T460s. There have been lightning flashes for much of the day; most of the flashes are happening over 15 miles away, but the weather station on the roof picks them up. The dogs are sniffing around the back yard as if it was their first visit. They’re impressed with markings, not realizing said markings are their own from earlier in the day. The severe weather predicted for Arizona is happening a bit further north today. There seems to be a better…

As a quick update on things, I’ve updated my Coaching Pricing Page with my latest service availability. For a long time, I have had next-to-zero availability, due to the busy schedule here. So I’m excited to offer more services once again. “What’s Next” is a coaching format designed for people who know their personality type. This is one of my main audiences, and I will be publishing more free stuff for those of you in that group. I also added information on my Executive Retainer services,…

Architectural detail of Dallas’ Perot Museum of Nature & Science. The post Concretion appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

A lot of AIs were misaligned this week. A fun little survey. This is not coverage of The Hackening, which appears to have arrived early, including a core vulnerability in PHP. That is a developing story. I will cover it properly soon. In the meantime, I have Claude Code updating everything in sight, I will take some additional common sense precautions, and I suggest you do the same. Misaligned? (At xAI) If so, to who? Gunther Eagleman: Hey @grok , if you could tell humanity ONE truth we’re not…

Kaleidocraft was kind enough to make charms for our event passes! Kaleidocraft was kind enough to make charms for our event passes! It’s time for a report on our On The Paper Trail Live in Nashville event, which took place this past weekend in my hometown of Franklin (outside of Nashville, for those not from the area). While event organization can be a nervewracking experience, it's also incredibly satisfying when things go right, and this past weekend turned out to be a success. We had ink and…

Actor Michael Forest, who played Apollo in the Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?" and guest starred on shows from The Twilight Zone to The Dick Van Dyke Show. died on October 14, 2026, at the age of 97. He also appeared in several Roger Coman movies and dubbed voices on several anime projects (including Alex Rosewater on The Big O).Michael Forest was born Gerald Michael Charlebois on April 27, 1929, in Harvey, North Dakota. He moved with his family to Seattle while very young. He…

In the context of the wonderful “Bird Land” exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery (on till 8 February 2027), I’ve just started reading Mandy Hager’s “Lifted”, apparently inspired by Bill Hammond’s incredible painting “The Fall of Icarus”. You can get Lifted at Unity Books: www.unitybooks.co.nz/products/… or at BookHub: bookhub.co.nz/p/lifted-…

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-94300 for the project BIND 9 named, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix memory corruption in named triggered by replaying captured GSS-TSIG-signed UDP messages while the negotiated TSIG key remains valid, potentially allowing remote code execution when combined with crafted queries to an attacker-controlled zone. This is due to the affected components being written…

If you've not been living under a rock for the past year, it's very prominent how much of the news cycle revolves around AI these days. It's surely exciting but also a scary thing to witness as these LLMs get pretty good at things like knowledge work, programming, etc. Amongst the people I've interacted with, some are very much pro-AI while there are others who abhore the entire infrastructure behind it. I'm in neither camp and prefer to keep a more pragmatic stance on the subject. Of course,…

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