As mentioned in the last blog post, my GP found a lump in my right breast. She referred me to the local hospital under the NHS two weeks wait cancer pathway. That appointment was today. In short - there is a lump but it's not cancer, it's normal glandular tissue. I was anxious about the process at the clinic, and equally worried about being a man in a 'pink space'. I needn't have worried about the second point - it was not in any way a female orientated clinic, and I was treated perfectly…

Island Operations talk at PART On Tuesday evening, October 20, 2026, I gave a talk at the monthly meeting of PART of Westford, my local radio club. The meeting had an island activation theme. I went first with “Island Operations: Activating Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor,” and Adam (AA1N) and James (NV1U) followed with their Cross Island, Maine expedition. The talk ran about 20 minutes, and members in the room and on Zoom saw the slides. Adam took this photo of me presenting the first slide.…

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-111497 for the project Brotli, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix an out-of-bounds write in the Brotli decoder that permits remote code execution when processing malformed compressed streams. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but…

I’ve briefly seen the news regarding compromised intermediate certificates from some unknown CA (eMudrah) yesterday, but quickly dismissed them. I was like, shit happens, something leaked, certificates were already revoked, I was not affected, all good. Well, it appears the problem was much bigger. After a security researcher posted private keys for all certificates on GitHub (note the repository name), it has become clear that they weren’t private at all. Instead of 384 bits long random…

Just announced: Ironman Montana, in Great Falls, Montana, on August 15, 2027. It’s the last in the slate of new Ironman-branded races announced this week for 2027 in North America, which also includes Ironman 70.3 Lake George in Lake George, New York, on June 13, 2027; and Ironman 70.3 Utah in Orem, Utah, on August 21, 2027. The latter is now the closest race to me, but unfortunately only six days after Ironman Montana, so I can only do one of them—and I’m choosing the full. After a DNF in…

This will be a short one. I've talked about embedding PDFs on web pages for probably close to ten years now. Blame Adobe. Blame me being a nerd and finding this stuff interesting. Blame whoever. While I've blogged about the topic, I've also actually done that on my site here, in a variety of different ways. A while back I realized I wasn't being consistent with how I did... "stuff" here, like call outs, Youtube links, etc. I started a guide doc so I'd have a quick way to remember what I did…

[ in process of being co-written, as the day is in progress... ]

Dark Forestry. I’m tired, boss.

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-107891 for the project musl, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix multiple integer overflows in regcomp() when compiling untrusted regular expressions, leading to undersized allocations and possible out-of-bounds heap writes, denial of service, and arbitrary code execution. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where…

Heya! You might've noticed that my guestbook website, guestbooks.kamiscorner.xyz was down for about 8 or so hours today. Well, it's back up now! There was this really, really bad RCE vulnerability in PHP that got announced today (technically yesterday), for which a patch got released a couple hours ago. So, i had to take all my PHP stuff down for a good while, so it didn't get hacked. But hey, it's back up again, and we're running a secure php version! As far as i know nothing bad happened,…

There’s one image from The Legend of Hell House that I must’ve seen at an impressionable age, because it’s been seared into my brain as the definitive image of Hammer Horror. Four very 1970s, very British people approach the imposing gates of a gothic mansion shrouded in fog, and look up at it with steely resolve to find out what’s inside. I figured that I must not be the only one to be so impressed by it, since Edgar Wright referenced it in the beginning of his trailer for Don’t. One issue is…

You may or may not know this about me, but humorist James Thurber is a formative writer for me, along with other of his Algonquin Round Table pals like Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. The delightful play of his humor, both in writing and in cartooning, was something I took to right away, speaking to me across decades. He was pretty great! Also, and independently, The Thurber House, the non-profit literary arts center and museum located in Thurber’s Columbus, Ohio home, annually gives out…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1181/the-poisoned-dataset

A shaded courtyard in Ortigia, Syracuse. We are driving into Syracuse to visit Ortigia, a one-square-kilometer island of ancient streets and limestone buildings that juts into the Ionian Sea. This little outcrop was once the heart of Syracuse, one of the most powerful cities of the ancient Mediterranean, and a place that has figured prominently in Sicilian history for nearly three thousand years. Ortigia has always had something that became its key strategic advantage. It’s a tiny islet,…

Given the state of, well, everything, I figure the best thing to do at the moment is to post a few old cat photos. These are two-year-old photos of a couple of my neighbour cats. They’re still around these days, just two years older, so a bit quieter.

On a sem-whim, I bought Dupery (“A game of Solo Deduction”) from Steam. It’s a puzzle game in the style of Werewolf, but this time it’s Noir and Mafia. You have a grid (initially 3×3, but later bigger) of roles. Some innocent, some evil and quite a few are meddlers (innocent, but not necessarily helpful or truthful). You have to untangle the facts and arrest the evil. Arrest too many innocent people before you finish the case (a series of 5-7 puzzles) and you lose. So far I’ve played 5 hours ……

Ok, I'm cheating (a bit). I sowed Foxglove seed in trays to prick out into small pots for planting next spring. But I left it a bit late (end of August). Foxgloves are biennial which is a somewhat flexible term. If you sow them early enough they can flower the following year e.g. in 2026 for 2027. Then again they are apt to take two full years i.e. a 2026 sowing will bloom in 2028. So I bought a tray of plugs as seen above which are more advanced than my seedlings; hopefully some or all will…

Patricia Highsmith secured her reputation as a brilliant writer of crime fiction with The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), a mystery followed by four more Ripley novels, the last appearing in 1991. Not that Highsmith was unknown before Ripley. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, appeared in 1950 and was adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. A lesbian with a fondness for pet snails, Highsmith was quick to display her racism and anti-Semitism, as well as her contempt for those she…

So here is what Young Hellboy: Thrilling Sky Adventures (fourth and final issue out today!): …has been reminding me of, just a little bit: Yes, Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-47 from 1976, the infamous treasury-format release entitled “Superman Salutes the Bicentennial.” Why is it infamous, you ask? Because, despite having a big ol’ drawing of Superman on the cover, making one expect to see Superman adventures within, we get historically-themed comics like Tomahawk inserted, with very brief…

David at Forking Mad wrote Are you a Nimby? and said he'd not heard the term before, which surprised me. Nimbyism seems to be a really big conversation here. The counterpart is Yimby - Yes in my back yard. Usually this is all in reference to housing. I think we should probably be building new towns with excellent accessible infrastructure, at human scale, of houses that are sustainable and modern and interesting rather than hodgepodge mock Tudor dozen-at-a-time developments. Of course this…

I forget exactly where I was tipped off on the SN Operator by Epilogue, but I got around to picking one up. It’s described as “a cartridge slot for your computer”, and that’s a mostly accurate way of thinking about it. This device isn’t like an Analogue Super Nt (which is a cartridge device but houses actual hardware to reproduce and run the cartridge game itself); rather, the SN Operator is a device that reads Super Nintendo (SNES) cartridges and does a couple of savvy things: Verifies…

Add the sury.org repository using its archive keyring, then install PHP: sudo apt update sudo apt install -y ca-certificates curl sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings curl -fsSL https://packages.sury.org/debsuryorg-archive-keyring.deb \ -o /tmp/debsuryorg-archive-keyring.deb sudo apt install -y /tmp/debsuryorg-archive-keyring.deb . /etc/os-release echo "Types: deb URIs: https://packages.sury.org/php Suites: ${VERSION_CODENAME} Components: main Signed-By:…

i’ve never liked a glass of i’ve never liked a glass of milk. like sweatpants everyone suddenly wore because a lazy day had become necessary, i never understood it. funny, though, isn’t it? what does my understanding have to do with waking up in the morning, eating cereal, and going on about the day? there was one day in particular i wish had never existed. i fed a green-eyed cat. probably not green-eyed. what do i know? eyes were either brown, light, dark, or mine, for me. but this particular…

I have written and not posted quite a few blog posts over the last month of silence. Nothing seems to come out on the page the way I want it to. I get halfway through a draft and decide I don't know if I actually want to post or not, so it ends up languishing in my list as unpublished. Last week, after work one day I drove to my favorite spot down the county highway, got inspired, and sat there for an hour and a half writing on my computer until I had over three thousands words and a complete…

Links: Nonfiction Is Struggling. Publishers Are Making It Worse, by Tajja Isen, The Walrus The Lucrative World of Literary Scams, by Snigdha Poonam, The Dial The New Age of Reading, by Nathan Heller, New Yorker Why Are So Many Contemporary Novelists Not Naming the Narrator?, by Ilana Bean, Literary Hub

Festivitas: Add festive lights to your devices.

On an Arduino there are libraries to drive sensors. On a Linux desktop the hardware is automatically configured and abstracted. But what about embedded Linux? What about a Raspberry Pi? This is where the Devicetree comes in: how Linux learns about the hardware — your way of specifying hardware.

I replaced this blog’s Python spell checker that took more than three minutes to run with the new rubocop-spellcheck. I really love RuboCop for its standard approach to linting and auto-correction, which solves the difficult problem of deciding between tabs and spaces (use defaults). My typical implementation in Ruby projects is to add a standard .rubocop.yml, run rubocop -a, ask an AI to fix easy fixable violations, then run rubocop --auto-gen-config to mark all remaining ones as an exception.…

I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during the missile gap years when the U.S. thought it was falling behind the Soviet Union in nuclear capabilities. Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of…

pressed flower collection 🔗 https://things.pagecord.com/a-scan-of-dried-flowers