A dull cool day. No sunshine. Put a lot of old troughs in the incin. place. Did B1 car. Cleared two loads from silage lab. Dot, Jane home. Poor Jack Oxton died.

Performance budgets need a representative worst, while Safari changes identity resolution and Chrome improves module recovery and memory debugging.

One of the biggest trends in online mapping this year has definitely been pixelating the world.Back in January, software engineer and artist Andy Coenen released his interactive, isometric pixel-art map of New York City: Isometric NYC. Since then, other developers have jumped on the bandwagon, and we now have:Isopolis - isometric San FranciscoLondon, drawn - isometric LondonearthtoPixels - isometric João Pessoa, BrasilOne notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their…

The organisers of Essen Spiel produce maps for download, but not the good ones.

Richie Rich & Casper #20 Date: October 1977 Publisher: Harvey Publications, Inc. Cover Price: 35¢ 2013 Price Range: $1.00 - $10.00 Stats: 21 color pages plus ads and "Richie's Mailbox" letters page Writers: ? Artists: ? Notable Notes: Richie and Casper discover the value of a penny! Extreme Up Trading! Have you heard about these people who do extreme up-trading? You know, they start with some small object (or amount of money) and then try to see who can get the biggest or best or most expensive…

Recently, while working through Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy with my mom, I encountered a new-to-me poetic form: the sestina. Jaouad’s book is a collection of creative enticements from writers and artists, musicians and teachers, and we’d come across Ann Patchett’s prompt, “The Mouse Sestina,” in the midst of a particularly hectic time. It was still winter, the radiant heating in my upstairs loft had sprung a leak and flooded the carpet, and I found myself replacing our flooring while…

Later this afternoon, PHP is going to announce the patches for two highly critical vulnerabilities found in the PHP core. Both seem exploitable without authentication on any remote website that has sessions or file uploads enabled, which both are enabled in the default php.ini config.

Double Maths First Thing is all a bit chaotic Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to find and share the joy in maths, puzzles and working things out. I’m likely to have some availability for new students in the next few months, so if you know of anyone who needs A-level help, feel free to send them my way! Links Hope Duncan at the University of Leeds has a new podcast, Unapologetic Mathematicians, available via Spotify, Apple and RSS; I imagine wherever you get your…

Someone made a throwaway comment about wearing lycra in a meeting at work and I laughed it off, as I've laughed at the middle-aged man in lycra joke plenty of times myself. A bloke gets to his…

If you are a software engineer, or generally work in the tech industry, there is a good chance that you heard about the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise that was disclosed yesterday (October 20, 2026). If you don’t, you may have noticed an uptick in software updates for various products that you use. I won’t go through the entire background of the situation as there are plenty of other posts, including the now public bug report from Mozilla, that describe the details of the compromise.

Last Sunday was dark, rainy and gloomy, but we make our way towards the Scène Cæcillia for the last representation of "Prima Facie". And boy was it worthwhile.

A book blurb from former Prime Minister Liz Truss: In this explosive insider account, former British Prime Minister Liz Truss revisits the extraordinary events of 2022 from inside Downing Street, challenging the establishment narrative surrounding the Mini-Budget and revealing a far deeper struggle over who really controls Britain. Truss exposes the immense influence wielded by unelected institutions, from the Bank of England and the Treasury to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and reveals…

Following the success of Simon’s Collingwood appearance at the The Fareham RailEx show earlier this month which included being awarded ‘Best layout in Show’ , Collingwood and its modern signalling in miniature is at two back to back shows at the beginning of November. First up on Saturday 7th November Collingwood will be at the High Wycombe & District MRS reinstated Wycrail show, being held in the superbly restored historic original Wycombe Railway 1854 Brunel Broad Gauge Railway Shed, located…

I Just Can’t Wait to Be King in 16:9, running as native code. TLKRecomp is The Lion King for the Super Nintendo, rebuilt as a native PC program. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, plays from the Westwood logo to the final fight with Scar, and can widen the picture to 16:9. It took ten days, and AI agents wrote the code. They worked in a loop: try something, compare it frame by frame with the original game, find the first thing that differs, fix it, and go again. This post explains what a…

Ettina Bhuja is a cozy hike located in the beautiful town of Sakleshpura, a small hill station located around 230 km away from Bengaluru. Its name when translated to English means "Ox's shoulder". This is because the peak, when viewed from a distance, looks like a bull's hull. The reported trail length ranges from 3-3.5 km (various websites) to 4-5 km (official Karnataka government signage). It's mentioned to take around 3-4 hours, but if you are even mildly fit, you can complete it much…

Book launch for THE SOLAR GRID hardback tentatively locked in... in Denmark! Probably around early-summer next year. Social media campaigning has been spreading me a little thin. You'd be surprised at the amount of time that goes into shooting and editing a 30 second reel. I'm gonna need to pull away and focus on finishing up writing, drawing, and designing TIMES NEW HUMAN, which—as per my agreement with EUNIC—will need to be launched, at least locally, before year's end. Look at me…

While Rock Pigeons are a common sight across the US, I don’t see them particularly often. It was, therefore, nice to spend some time watching the large flock of wild pigeons that hangs out on the rooftops of the town where I’ve been staying in Marche. You’ll notice there are some pretty significant variations in […]

October 21, 2026 It’s time to bring out the bright colors, if you have them! The crowds these days are pretty drab (and I don’t really do much to help that, unless I’m wearing some purple!) Maybe this will help? Scarf – The Met Store If you have a good core of navy (and a few white tops of some sort), this color palette is pretty straightforward. This does NOT mean that it’s easy to find this year; it’s a “muted” year in the clothing world! Scarf – The Met Store Well… This year, both orange and…

I did this for hexes and planets, but what if I want to use this same system for giving an NPC some specific behaviour notes? Forget how they look, how do I give this NPC some life without doing a dreaded bad accent? Yes, I twisted this one to make another meaningless acronym: TWOF.Tempo: The speed of their speech Weight: The heft of their delivery Openness: Friendliness and informality Flair: How much theatre do they addRoll 5d6 and drop the highest. Imagine that 4s look like Ns, 5s like Hs,…

Early in the development of Paxton Road there were decisions to make about arrangement of structures…In the original concept the cement silo was to be placed at the rear, as per the inspiration, Barnstaple goods yard. However, I wasn’t certain and instead tried the now familiar front location combined with some other yard structures and the composition clicked.But imagine if things hadn’t changed? Would the layout be as fun to photograph?I found this photos whilst digging some out for a…

It's the time of year when German beer is that little bit more visible in the shops and speciality bars. There are the seasonal Oktoberfest variants, of course, but it seems to be an excuse for distributors and retailers to put other sorts in there as well, to fill out the lists and embellish the theme.At Tapped, they added Faust Sommer Festbier to the draught selection, offering a generous half litre for €7, which isn't bad in Dublin these days. It's a handsome deep golden colour with fine…

Before the proportional compass, there were the proportional dividers, better known as the reduction compass. This was a much simpler instrument but it also worked on the same Euclidian theory of proportion applied to isosceles triangles. A normal pair of dividers has two legs joined together at one end by a hinge. The illustrations are mostly taken from Ina Prince & Patrick Rocca the authors of both Sectors: and precious mathematical and drawing instrument from the 17th and 18th century…

Here are two random 1950s photos for ya (I saved .02 seconds typing "ya" instead of "you"). Somebody stuck some Skyway gondolas up above the Pirate Ship, but you know what? It works. If we all had Skyway gondolas, there would be no war. Think about it. This was from a very faded slide, and I meant to capture a "before" image so that you could see what a genius I am, but then I forgot. Some genius! Next is a photo of the old Frontier Trading post, with a bit of the corral for miniature horses to…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze (1991)

Setting up a remote BirdNET microphone on a Raspberry Pi is a great way to pick up bird calls from the other end of the garden, but it's no use if you have to SSH in and start the stream by hand every time it reboots. Here's how I got the whole thing coming up on its own at boot. What you need A Pi with Raspberry Pi OS installed A working USB sound card and microphone (I'm using a Soundblaster Play! 3 and a Clippy EM272 Mono Microphone) mediamtx already downloaded on the Pi. I used the…

When spindle turning between centers you are always peeling perpendicular to the grainDo you learn the way I do?If we're talking about a hands-on skill like turning, I need to understand why a process works. I have a terrible memory for procedure, so unless I understand the procedure steps in context, I won't be able to remember the procedure.When I begin to learn turning I read a lot and saw a lot of videos. But very little of that information was about the "why." It was mostly about the…

The Maclock hack I linked to many months ago is now a finished product (with various flavours of kit), which is kind of fun to see. I have managed to procrastinate assembling mine for a stupefying amount of time now, and have some hope that posting this will shame me into finishing it (I actually have two Maclocks, plus my own 3D printed SE/30)…

As you may have noticed, September was a productive writing month, while October seems not be; you would be mistaken, for I have taken upon the challenge to write my Sunflowers story more thoroughly than the previous. For the whole of October I’ve been brainstorming, writing draft after draft — currently on attempt number five which is the farthest I’ve come — , researching, discovering; above all, discovering. Each day I’ve been writing the equivalent of one thousand words or more. On good…

Easy runs make me feel like a bit of a fraud. The running is simple enough, but once a run lands on Strava with my name next to it, the pace looks like I couldn't be bothered, and that number gets to…

An engaging musical from Paramount Pictures, RHYTHM ON THE RIVER (1940), was just released on Blu-ray by Universal.The movie has a sparkling cast, including Bing Crosby, Mary Martin, Basil Rathbone, and Oscar Levant, plus a slew of familiar supporting faces.Rathbone plays Broadway composer Oliver Courtney, who actually isn't a composer at all; Bob Sommers (Crosby) writes the music for Oliver's songs, and Cherry Lane (Martin) writes the lyrics.The catch is, both Bob and Cherry think they're…