I just got back from three days at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, where I gave a keynote, led a session with faculty, and spent a Saturday morning with the Grewcock Presidential Scholars. The keynote, on Thursday evening, was titled Designing the Future: Creativity, Human Agency, and AI. This was a variation of […] Source

I discovered an alternative to Suno for working with my song ideas. It is called Mozart AI. It is a little more flexible when working with songs that I created myself, especially when Suno gives me a false positive and rejects them with "This audio matches an existing recording." Is it better? No. Is it worse? Also, no. Mozart AI's Hans 2.0 and Suno v6 both turn a text prompt into a full song, but they are used for different reasons. Suno is the bigger, more established generator. Suno's newer…

Yesterday I saw the 4k restoration of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland at the El Capitan Theatre, where the movie is screening for the theater’s centennial. Before the movie started, there was a live Wurlitzer organ performance.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I Newsletter I Email

Get new posts by email Subscribe Enjoying the blog? Help with costs & future trips. Facebook Instagram Buy me a pint Pints Before Forty: A Birthday Trail Through Ilkeston & Heanor With my 40th birthday just a few days away, Saturday 7 November was a lovely excuse to head back to Ilkeston and Heanor with Neil, Niall and Wendy. We started in Ilkeston with a warm welcome from Ben at The Burnt Pig, followed by The Crafty One and a look at the town’s famous Hole in the Wall. It was great catching up…

“Dealers of Hate: Kyiv Independent documentary investigates aggression against Ukrainians in Europe” kyivindependent.com/dealers-o…

Does the world need another comment about Russell Brand? Whatever, it's getting one. And with special regard to that period between, roughly, 2013 and 2015 when Brand assumed a left wing persona and was variously feted by the radical and mainstream sections of the labour movement. Following Brand's convictions for rape and sexual assault, point scoring has been the order of the day. For the Daily Mail, Brand is the left's "fault". Presumably because his ascent to prominence was through Channel…

Now my advice for those who die, Declare the pennies on your eyes, ‘cause I’m the Taxman, Yeah, I’m the Taxman.The Beatles, Taxman Just shy of one year after it began, my battle with the UK tax authority is finally over. When we left off, I had managed to claw back several thousands of pounds, but had just been hit by a curveball that left me apparently owing a couple grand more than I expected to. However, I couldn’t really work out why. Photo by the author As a reminder, this was the latest…

“About Texas,” newspaper + marker, 2024 My Friday newsletter began: Molly Ivins called Texas “the laboratory for bad government,” and that’s been the case my entire adult life. I was a 17-year-old in Ohio during the 2000 election, and since I couldn’t vote, I went around waving a copy of Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush at my family members, warning them that the whole country could become Texas. (Whenever other Americans joke that they wish Texas would go ahead and…

For a change we thought we'd risk a more urban holiday with the children. So far we've always done trips where there's lots of chances for outdoor play; but this time we thought it'd be interesting to visit London and see some of the more famous sites. I've been to London more recently, but only to see friends, and I don't think I've visited any of the most famous landmarks since I was a child myself. The authentic London experience started right from our arrival with the driver who we'd booked…

I wrote about art, therapy, and cognitive distortion pedals.

The latest typewriter interview is with cartoonist Edward Steed.

I had some apprehension going into Charlottetown Zine Fest today: the idea of spending six hours sitting in the same place, on display, subject to all manner of social interactions, wasn’t presenting as “delight” as much as “dread.” Or at least “I’ll power through.”Surprise: I loved it.What I learned, most of all: the people who will go to something called “Charlottetown Zine Fest” are, by and large, my people: weirdos, creatives, unusuals, divergents, the curious and daring. They were…

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube A few summers ago, I started one of my mixtapes with a very specific, silly concept: a pair of elder millennial parents have a few drinks after dinner and start playing their kids the rap and hip-hop of their youth, but the songs get increasingly filthy and inappropriate, until the kids flee in terror and the parents are left grinding on each other in the kitchen: A good number of these songs surfaced while listening to Confucius and Fresh bring more…

Saw this on Reddit the other day and tried it on Nightly today. The current behavior is, if you hit Command-K (as opposed to Command-L) or manually select a search engine (including the default) from the drop-down in the address bar, you can press enter after pasting or typing a URL, and it will do a search of the URL rather than navigate to its address. With the new behavior, the only way to search a URL is to select it from search engine suggestions. (This aligns them more or less with Chrome…

nothing I want to say will shock you but suddenly I'm shy like the same words I've already said will this time turn sour

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Joseph Heinrich Feldmeyer/Feldmeier, Schreiner or Tischler [joiner], son of Joseph Henrich and Anna Catharina Elisabetha (Kortenkamp) Feldmeier, was born in Telgte 2 June 18511 and died there 8 May 1916.2 He married in Telgte 15 April 1874, Theresia Nölken,3 daughter of Johann Dirk and Maria Catharina (Lüchtefeld) Nölken. She was born in Glandorf 1 July 18484 and died in Telgte 5 March 1892.5,6 They resided first at house number 413 in Telgte7 before…

For JSTOR Daily, Angelica Frey looked asked the question “What’s Queer About The Legend of Zelda?” with references from Tison Pugh: Link’s identity and maturation also defy normative expectations: he ages forward and backward throughout his many adventures. In The Legend of Zelda and The Wind Waker, for instance, he is young and elfin; in Ocarina of Time, he spends the first half of the game as a child and the second as an adult; and in Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild, he is rendered…

Title: What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust (Flavia De Luce, #11) Author: Alan Bradley Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pages: 320 Flavia de Luce has taken on the mentorship of her odious moon-faced cousin Undine, who has come to live at Buckshaw following the death of her mother. Undine’s main talent, aside from cultivating disgusting habits, seems to be raising Flavia’s hackles, although in her best moments she shows potential for trespassing, trickery, and other assorted mayhem.…

I think Cal Newport is absolutely on to something with his discussion of reward shortcutting in this video. When you arrive at some destination, but skipped important parts of the journey, your shortcut deprived you of something meaningful.

I subscribe to the RSS feed for Games Industry.biz in my feed reader. Thanks to that subscription, I became aware of an October 26, 2026 article titled Epic Games CEO calls Steam’s AI disclosure policies “a political act”. My first thought upon reading the headline is that the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, is baiting both traditional and social media. Reading his comments did not disabuse me of that notion. I would normally ignore this sort of obvious bait, but I like a good challenge. I had…

Title: Numb Were the Beadsman's Fingers Author: Alan Bradley Publisher: Doubleday Canada Pages: 256 In the cloisters of Golgotha House, a mere binocular’s-squint away from Buckshaw, a nun lies dead. When her fellow Sisters prepare her body for burial, they discover that their companion has been living a shocking lie for years. The truth about her past, and the dark reasons she harbored for escaping it, are impossible to fathom. Charged with cracking this mystery is the firm of Arthur W. Dogger…

Creative block is real. Writer’s block is real. Not every single day is productive. Sometimes writing a daily post is a piece of cake. Other times, a daily post is just to avoid breaking the chain. In recent months, I went through an episode of stress that disrupted my sleep. Writing didn’t flow for quite a while. No aha moments. No rushing to capture a thunder of creativity. To spark the joy of writing, I started a secret book project. No deadlines. No announcements. No other expectations than…

She floated weightless, in the vast nothingness, long full of power she had no need to use, no desire to use. She looked upon the world, and saw the people, their joy and sadness, their long depressions, and their eras of bliss. She – though their was no gender in this formless void – decided it was time to venture, to experience for herself. Her will drifted across the world, looking for an anchor, looking for a place to cast her magic. She began as any human does, a clump of cells, dividing…

Title: Street Photography Africa Author: Nadine Barth, Azu Nwagbogu, Tosin Adeosun Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pages: 256 A bold, dynamic, and definitive survey of contemporary street photography from across Africa, featuring leading image makers shaping a vibrant and exciting genre. Energetic, colorful, experimental — street photography across Africa has a well-established and complex history, and its own unique dynamic. From classic compositions of architecture, people, and movement, to…

Thankfully everything posted on Reddit is truthful, right? Right..? The post It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests appeared first on @Kevuhnn / 📸 / 📚 / 🇨🇦.

So great to get to see friends that you haven’t seen in a while. Was fun to (briefly) catchup with Patrick Rhone at our Things 4 Good candle fundraiser.

I was watching The Four Seasons yesterday, and there were a couple of actors I wondered who were. I mean, not Alan Alda, but a couple of the others… so I hit the “Emacs, tell me who what is” button on my remote, and nothing much happened. So things had bitrotted once again, which isn’t weird — the code is a bit of a Rube Goldberg thing which you can peruse here, but I wouldn’t really recommend it. But I’ve spent the entire day fixing it, so I deserve to complain aimlessly in a blog post, right?…

My plan for my vegetable garden is coming to fruition. Here´s some of the steaps I took to set it up for Autumn.

There is a folder on my computer called garment. Before that there was one called time, and before that, disk, display, cybernaut, machine. Each one began the same way: I came across an image somewhere it didn’t belong — in an article about something else, at the bottom of a search for something unrelated — and looking at it brought a theme to mind. So I made a folder, named it, and put the image inside. Then I added to it, for months. Hundreds of images later, that folder is a mood board. This…