Life Yes, it was hot. I caught up with old Fridayers in Soho Square on Tuesday for a pleasant if prematurely curtailed evening. Everyone seemed to be in fairly fine fettle, general workplace malaise notwithstanding. We went to see Empire of the Sun on Wednesday evening with Lou, which was an absolute mission of travel, cat, and children management. On the world’s sweatiest bus to the gig, through parts of town I’ve never seen before (and never wish to see again) I confess there was a moment…
We’ve been reporting on the threat to the vital early years service at the Aldgate School since October 2024. Our last post on the matter is here. For ideological reasons the neo-liberal City of London council decided to defunded this excellent facility and replace it with a hugely inferior ‘decentralised’ service. Given that the square mile covers an extremely small local authority area there is no need to ‘decentralise’ anything because all services are already in easy reach of all residents.…
As software engineers, we want everything to be perfect: the code, the variable names, the architecture, the tests, the documentation, the CI/CD pipeline, and so on.We build 90% of a project in 10% of the time, but the last 10% to make it perfect takes the remaining 90% of the time. And sometimes it takes so long that we don’t even ship at all.There are two reasons this happens: 1) we want to be the GOAT (Greatest of All Time), and 2) we’re afraid of criticism.1. To Be the GOATOnline,…
A halo coronal mass ejection was observed on 30-Jun, associated with an X1.0 flare. Modelling suggests this CME will have a glancing impact with Earth on 03/0500UT +/- 10 hours (early evening on the 3rd AEST). Intervals of G2 geomagnetic conditions are forecast on 03-Jul due to this impact, decreasing to G0-G1 on 04-Jul. Currently conditions are quiet.If storms eventuate, visible aurora may be seen in Tasmania southern parts of Victoria, and possibly southern South Australia, during local night…
8616/21535It's not particularly unpleasant, just boring now. Energy low, but not experiencing last week's ennui with most food and entertainment. Though it still amazes me that I have pretty much all the world's entertainment at my finger tips but struggle a bit to find anything to watch. And I am just a bit too tired to read more than a few pages at a time.
Don’t avoid writing something down just because you think it’s obvious.
Rand’s perspective on All Hands is worth a read this week. I did enjoy the interview with the airline pilot. Quote of the Week The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. High Output Management Andrew S. Grove Leadership In defense of AI mandates (xpost) - interesting perspective. You will lose people obviously, in some way or another.
I’m a front-end developer not a medical practitioner. If you’re bleeding IRL visit the hospital and stop googling medical issues!The full-bleed layout — as described there by Josh Comeau — can be done with CSS grid (and subgrid). Sometimes you can’t grid the entire page.That’s where Andy Bell’s utility class is useful..full-bleed { width: 100vw; margin-left: calc(50% - 50vw); }But it ain’t perfect. The issue is that viewport units don’t solve the classic scrollbar problem. If you’re on macOS or…
I have been holding back from posting another entry, because the previous postSpelling Grammar Words Languagewas so popular - the number of comments is heading for 100, the sign of high interest. A key feature is that the word 'fancy' does not appear in the post, but does appear in a response I made:Uncle Matthew (ie Farve) says in The Pursuit of Love'Fancy hearing one's wife talking about notepaper - the irritation!'Dear blogfriend Roger Allen picked up on this use of 'fancy' and then so did…
TL;DR: Apple Books is a storefront that happens to read ebooks. If you own your library, the real choice is between two apps. Readest is open-source, runs on everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, web), and has the deepest feature set I've seen (side-by-side reading, sentence-level translation, KOReader/WebDAV sync), but it's still v0.x and some marquee features are unfinished. Bookshelves is Apple-only and commercial, but it's polished, ships fast, and pairs a strong reader with a…
Yesterday I stumbled across ScribblyPam's article on The Gentrification of Air-Drying Clothes and realised this "vintage" value can also be applied to my type of house. I also realised this would fit nicely as a post for JulyReply! I live in a 16th century English cottage. Traditionally, these were built by the people who would actually live in them - typically poorer members of society who worked the land and needed a roof over their head. Cottages were also provided by the local landowner to…
It has been nearly two weeks since I last posted here. I’ll promise that was not planned, it just sort of happened. That would sound better if there was some family emergency or something, but there wasn’t (thank goodness). My excuse is really rather flimsy – summertime activities just got in the way. That conjures […]
Digital Swamp Log - Q2 2026 Dear reader, We stumbled this quarter. Now we get up. Retail therapy: short spark. Health: real wealth. Website: Redesigned home and index to have simpler layout. New dashboard for navigating the swamp. Life: Rolling wedding plans (thee stork club). Got our rings-v1. Bought some purple pillows. Oh, and my (soon to be) wife had successful LASIK surgery - hooray! Work: Asked for a raise, got a promotion to Director of Physical AI. My direct reports are mostly agentic…
I make many of my road trips alone, but when I can I bring a friend. I’ve managed to photograph all of them along the way. Dawn is my first and most frequent road-trip friend. She was along on my very first road trip in 2006, when we explored US 40 from Indianapolis to Illinois together! We met on a mission trip to Mexico at the time both of our marriages were dissolving. We clicked as friends and discovered that we were both curious about the old roads. On the National Road near Greenup,…
Made a blog post about our REALITY ORP performance at ChaNorth for Upstate Arts Weekend
At first, this was a really easy post to write, but then I discovered some things. Built a lot of things. Spent a lot of tokens… And it became one of the hardest, longest, and most expensive posts I’ve done (the API costs were not small). I’ve had this thing on my mind for ages and it started when I was thinking about how the mere presence of a technology name in a prompt seemed to bias the output to that technology. For example, I looked through a number of system prompts for Agentic tooling…
Last Saturday I participated in the Art Explora Festival where I got to visit the boat-museum where you get to do a VR experience visiting Venice, Athens or Alexandria (I did the last one) using Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed maps. For a 7 minute experience, it was really good and interesting. On the other hand, I found Chloe’s LLM-powered Historical vlogs that are hyper-realistic by using LLMs to generate the background video. This can make history much more interesting that the History channel,…
It has been an exciting week. Despite a few days off, including today, there is still plenty to talk about today so grab a drink, get comfortable and find your wallet…First of all, massive exciting news! A GWR ‘what-if’ Kerr Stuart - I’ve been sat on this for months…When Rapido Trains UK announced their 009 range Steve and I began discussions about creating a unique model, not just a livery but tooling variation for my Llanfyllin and Llangynog Light Railway scheme. It has been incredibly…
VAR instigated a retake of my old retake of Billy Bragg’s “A New England”. I wasn’t even born when we won the World Cup I’m fifty-nine soon and all hope I’d given up My wife asks me now ‘Why don’t you be a better fan?’ But all the players I loved at school already failed for Ing-erland I loved you then, and I love you still I bet you’d beat Ghana, it ended nil-nil I don’t feel bad about letting you know I just feel bad about letting you go,,. You know we might just win the World Cup If we play…
Trust me #118Love You by Primal ScreamThe cover of Reverberations ( Travelling In Time)Way before the beats, groove, futuristic sounds and strobe lights of Screamadelica and the leather-clad rock n roll swagger, funky jams and blissed out ballads of Give Out But Don't Give Up, Primal Scream were a band (like many from Glasgow) influenced by the West Coast California sounds of bands like Love and The Byrds. The sun kissed music from America was filtered through the Glasgow rain, Southside…
I just stumbled upon Manu’s post on the AI Compass test. Fifteen questions about your relationship with AI, which are supposed to define your archetype and your position on a perceptual map. It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so that was a good opportunity to do so. I took the quiz, and here’s my archetype: The Shrug AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It’s overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You’ll use it when it’s…
Not sure that title even makes sense to be honest, but on we go! I listen to BBC 6Music most mornings when I’m working. The joys of working at home, my music choice, my coffee, my desk and a window I can open as wide as I wish. However that means keeping a browser tab open all the time, something I’m clearly not great at as I kept closing it/the browser and so I looked for a solution. I found one, adapted it for 6Music, and have been using it since then (2021). Over the past few weeks I’ve been…
Welcome to the introduction of what is a new approach to productivity that you've never come across before. An approach that will bring instant relief to those struggling with task lists that are just too convoluted, systems that are too complicated, or with organisation in general being a struggle on a daily basis. This method has served me well through a professional sales career, and the results gain admiration from colleagues, line managers and boardroom CEO's. Comments ranging from "I…
AI chatbots know more about you than you realise If a machine can infer for you from millions of data pieces out on the internet, how hard will it be for it to infer you? How (not to) name things Don’t add “image” to a text alternative for an image. It’s already clear it’s an image. Don’t add “go to” to the name of a link. That’s what links do. They go somewhere. I have to learn to resist the urge to state the obvious. The Costco theory of the internet A read-worthy essay by Westenberg on the…
I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was the actor George Sanders. With his good looks and crisp, sonorous upper-crust voice, he became the man for playing debonair, louche, more or less depraved English aristo types – most memorably Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jack Favell in…
Writing this up while I remember what I did. Bit of a yak shave. Rekordbox vs Ableton Live Link, and the restThis is my setup: bunch of modern synths, mostly semi-modular, USB midi for the most part. Things like a Make Noise 0-Coast and a Behringer Neutron alongside more slick gear like a Novation Peak. I was definitely part of the Covid surge in interest there.Plus, an ebay flavoured DJ rig with very old parts - because they were cheaper - 2x CDJ-900s (2009) and a big old DJM-2000 (2010) and a…
A gem from Dickon Edwards’ diaries: A frequently asked question: Why don’t you just get a job? Answer: Because I’ve got too much else to do. Answer: Because I’m too busy to get a job. Answer: Being unemployed is a full-time job in itself, involving skills and time in order to survive. So I do have a job. It’s just atrociously paid. Answer: Because I’ve never lasted in the many Wage Slave-type jobs I’ve had in the past. It’s only a matter of time before I’m dismissed, or have to leave to avoid…
It’s often nice to spot familiar faces where you don’t expect them, like an unforeseen run-in with a friend while on holiday. Joy in unexpected encounters is possible in the intellectual realm too; during my wanderings through the linguistic past, I’ve delighted in meeting languages and their humans whom I already know from elsewhere. One example is the Hittites. A culturally Christian upbringing had acquainted me with this mighty nation of the semi-historical past, mentioned in various…
Überbackene Zucchini-Hälften mit Ofengemüse aus Pilzen, Tomaten und Zwiebel – mit einem Würzöl Es ist gerade wunderbar frisch in Hamburg – also so 23 Grad. Nach den vielen Hitzetagen eine Wohltat. Der Professor erwartete mich in seinem Garten. Ich hatte diesen neuen Zucchini-Auflauf dabei – geröstetes Ofengemüse mit eigens hergestelltem Würzöl. Alles unter einer krossen Käsekruste. »Haben Sie Wissenswertes gefunden?« Der Professor nickte und las etwas Wiki-Wissen zu den Zucchini vor. Zucchini…
