So in case you missed the news from my last blog post (I haven’t exactly made it to the cover of Newsweek), I have released a demo for my space based autobattler Ridiculous Space Battles. You can grab the demo from here. In the run-up to release I knew a bunch of players had said they really don’t like the idea of grid-based movement, which marked a change from Gratuitous Space Battles, but I thought people would be won over when they tried it… Anyway, to cut a long story short, almost everyone…

The PHP security releases of 21 October add a new setting: memory_hard_limit_percent. It changes what memory_limit means. memory_limit is now a soft limit. A second, higher limit sits above it. A process that reaches that one is ended on the spot, with exit code 137. No shutdown functions, no error page, no line in your PHP error log.

I found in Newsonat by Mark Rogers his 5 Ws of Reading. So here are mine. WHO - An author you would love to have a ‘one to one’ with? That’s definitely James Altucher. I’ve binge-read almost all his books. I found Choose Yourself when I was on my way out of burnout and it inspired me to adopt a daily healthy practice—that idea alone changed my life. Although I’ve stalking James a lot, that probably I’d have to come up with good questions. WHAT - What genre do you most gravitate to? I try to…

My thanks to David Polfeldt at Li’l Factory for generously sending me copies of the first four books from his new publishing imprint. Li’l Factory is based in Sweden but publishes in English, and describes its mission thus: Li’l Factory is focused on publishing odd stories that find no other home. The authors may be young and looking for their first breakthrough, or they may be veterans sitting on material that is rejected by trad publishers. Li’l Factory aims to make a string of beautiful…

We are right in the middle of fall, and that means BazelCon 2026 just took place. This time around it was hosted in Amsterdam and spanned three days: one day of tutorials and an overlapping Buildbarn meetup that I wasn’t aware of, and two days of main-conference talks and events. And as the event is behind us, it’s time for the now-traditional recap. What follows is a recollection of my notes arranged by topic and intermixed with my own commentary and thoughts. Some sections and topics are more…

When I reconfigure my Zsh terminal, I want to see the changes immediately. A good way to do that on Mac is: exec zsh This uses the Zshbuiltin exec command to replace my login shell (Zsh) with another login shell (Zsh). Sourcing the Zsh config (source ~/.zshrc) is less reliable, as things like custom functions you’ve removed tend to stick around. Check out zshbuiltin for more.

You have a spreadsheet with business-partner IDs and want to check the names against SAP. In Joule Work Desktop (JWD), a useful request would be: Look up business partner 1000001 in SAP and compare its name with the entry in this spreadsheet. Tell me what differs, include the source system and retrieval time, and leave SAP unchanged. A custom MCP server for Joule Work Desktop can give the assistant the specific SAP tool it needs for that task. Your developers decide what the tool can read,…

Even though we’re having a relatively warm (and delightful) fall, my cravings for carbs-wrapped-in-carbs, caramelized onions, and earthy skillets of vegetables don’t care. Plus, as we’re in the thick of busy times — this year it’s college applications, middle school adjustments, me, working on a new cookbook for you — any time a full meal can be made in one pan and not feel joyless or compromised, it’s going immediately in our dinner rotation. This sure did. Read more »

Just watched Joanna Stern’s review of the iPhone Duo and based on what I saw, I would not buy it at this time. Not only is it too expensive, but too buggy.

I’ve been seeing an increase in advertising for services that promise to delete one’s data from data brokers. A business born from the fragility of the Internet and the plethora or services collecting data. Problem is, all of them are subscription services costing upwards to $20 per month for two people, which I find to be too expensive.

As you could probably tell, I was driving a bit recently, and once in a while saw this kind of a sign, often equipped with a (beloved) segmented font, reporting your current speed as detected by radar: Just today, I learned of an early version of this idea: 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…

The NIST elliptic curves have been in the news twice lately. A few days ago Anthropic posted a paper on the NIST curve seeds that I wrote about here. Now the curves are in the news again, this time over broken certificates. My post a few days ago was about the possibility that the NSA had added a backdoor to the NIST curves. Anthropic researchers showed that this wasn’t the case. The NSA had not able to defend how the curve seeds were chosen because they forgot, but researchers from Anthropic…

A prospective client once told me, “I don’t care about what you do or how. I only care about results.” This statement conveys short sightedness and ineffectiveness. Even if clients only care about results, they need to learn to respect the process. They won’t need to become the expert or execute on research or production, but they should care enough to understand what’s happening and why. Anything less signals thoughtlessness. It suggests that the clients would like the results, but don’t…

So the trees are shedding their leaves quickly, but there’s still a few colourful spots lingering, bathing in glorious sunshine. the view from my balcony And to the left, from my balcony, looking into the sun … the trees are nearly bare

Grafica Veneta has acquired British companies CPI Books and CPI Antony Rowe. The acquisition via parent company SoFiGraf’s GV Group, nearly doubles its revenue and strengthens its position as one of Europe’s largest book printers. Carlo Carrenho continues at his Publishing Perspectives post, “The acquired companies generate approximately €150 million ($168 million) annually and produce more than 100 million books. . . The acquisition of CPI Antony Rowe is particularly significant, as the…

Who are you?Michael Findlay, art dealer, New York CityWhat do you write?I write non-fiction to help people enjoy and understand modern art. My first novel “Tam’s Tale”, recently published, is a young man’s quest in an imaginary land blending intrigue adventure and fantasy. I had not thought about writing that kind of book, the idea came to me suddenly and the story flowed. I enjoyed writing it much more than non-fiction because I didn’t need to do any research.Where do you write?I write at a…

A colleague of mine mentioned that our 2017 linked data version of our 2014 volume on Koutsopetria on Cyprus has become rather hard to find on the internet. Fortunately, it has a DOI and that DOI takes you to a page on the Knowledge Commons (formerly Humanities Commons) page. William R. Caraher, R. Scott Moore, and David K. Pettegrew, Pyla-Koutsopetria I: Archaeological Survey of An Ancient Coastal Town. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Research Series. 2014 and…

Digital red string appears in Avengers Assemble #24 (Marvel, April 2014).

by Shawn Gilmore In significant ways, the Amazon Prime television adaptation of The Boys hews closely to its comic-book source material, with a titular government-supported team of jaded individuals attempting to hold reckless supes—the term in both the comics and show for super-powered individuals—in check.1 Collected editions and digital reprints of the comics helpfully lay out the narrative status quo of The Boys, which the show maintains: ▲ The Boys vol. 1: The Name of the Game (Dynamite,…

I wish I’d started planning my retirement fund earlier. For most of my 20s, I knew I should do something beyond the statutory pension insurance, but I never found the courage to learn about my options and actually invest my (kind of) hard-earned money. I didn’t really understand the systems, and I tend to be risk-averse, so the thought of potentially losing everything always spooked me. Turns out I lost out on a lot of potential gains by starting ten years late. But I did start when I turned…

Having not seen any dolphins in ages, this past weekend I had my second encounter in the last two weeks. In this instance, the pod of at least 50 Spinner Dolphins went zipping on by, but any encounter is better than none!

I’m still in recovery mode from the On The Paper Trail LIVE event this week. I spent the last two days just trying to get on top of my to-do lists, rest a little bit and give those kitties all the love they missed while we were away. I guess I just don’t bounce back as fast as I used to when I was younger. Sigh… Pens: New Pen and Ink Day: Sailor TUZU Adjust Crystal Violet and Robert Oster Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty (via CJs Wunderkammer) Reducing and Reorganising my Fountain Pen Collection (via…

A scoop on Persolaise. Regular readers will know that I’ve often wished Ulrich Lang would reveal the identity of his perfumer. Well, the other day, in my YouTube studio, this is precisely what he did. And he went one better, because he also arranged for this particular scent-maker to join us for part of the […] The post Live Interviews With Ulrich Lang And Natalia Outeda Of Frassai appeared first on .

# Introduction In my self-hosted infrastructure, most services are only reachable through my VPN. But some of them have a feature to share something with people outside: Immich has share links for albums and photos, Nextcloud has share links for files and folders. => https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2026-10-15-selfhosting-infrastructure-incus-os.html My self-hosted infrastructure with Incus OS I wanted to add some extra security, but the people receiving a link should not have to install a VPN…

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-109618 for the project PHP, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix multiple memory safety vulnerabilities that allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on your server. This isn't something you can just mitigate and be fine. You MUST patch this. Don't try to bargain here. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where…

I will be traveling overseas to visit a particular city. I did not plan this trip, as there were some urgent matters that I need to make the trip. Given that my relatives are also in that city, I be visiting them. Both my auntie and uncle who are in their 90s are staying in that city. Thus, visiting them is a must. As I am preparing my trip, I realised that I have not been to that city for more than 30 years. I cannot even remember when I last saw my relatives. After I have resolved my issue, I…

I ran a quick experiment with a few AI services. I took a screenshot of Toph’s submissions page and pasted it into three of them: Claude, Google Search (not Gemini), and ChatGPT. Each in a fresh chat, each with the same question: “Can you tell me where this screenshot is from?” I built Toph, so I knew the answer. What I wanted to know was whether the page was recognizable to anyone, or anything, that doesn’t stare at it every day.

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This is something I see time and again in Google Maps when plotting directions: You might be thinking “this feels like a genuine error – not every two places on earth can be connected,” but that’s not it. I am in a good traffic corridor and, ten seconds later, doing the same exact thing again shows proper directions: The clue as to what’s going on is elsewhere in both screenshots. My cell signal is low, and the Google Maps misrepresents no results arriving because of slow connection, with no…