With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map…
I’ve been arguing with people online. Maybe I should do less of that and ride my bike more. But I’ve also been trying to call out ableist behavior, which I think is important. People have also given me grief because I ride an ebike. Here’s my question to those people… First, imagine you like to ride a bike. Now imagine you get older, you get injured, or your body just doesn’t do what you want it to do without pain. Do you give up riding a bike, or do you figure out a way to keep riding a bike?…
This year's shincha is an unusual one. Harvested in April, this niche tea cultivar is called benitachiwase (ベニタチワセ), and it's commonly processed into black tea, but this is a shincha - a first flush green tea, you could say - so I have no idea what to expect. Let's dive in. The tea came in an unlabeled, vacuum-sealed package, so sadly I don't know which specific tea farm produced it. I was only able to narrow it down to the Shibushi area in Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu. Right out of the bag,…
Hey there. Before this week’s links, a quick update: After a couple of rounds of editing, I recruited a couple of friends as beta readers for Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. It’s not the first time someone’s read these ideas, but I like honest feedback before launching—to quiet the inner critic. As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Keeping a blog showed me a corner of the web outside the big platforms. But I didn’t know about the smolweb and its protocols…
My first week on NHSE's record a vaccination service. Joining NHS England I joined the RAVS (record a vaccination service) team at NHS England (NHSE) this week. Working on a contract via TPX Impact. Shout out to Frankie and others for helping me to settle in. It's great to be joining a team with some familiar faces! I'm excited to be working with NHSE, both my parents work in healthcare, one is a pharmacist and the other is a health visitor (previously a midwife). Both roles are close to…
A study of the diet of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea has enabled researchers to create a map of the availability of their forage species. The Tyee: Instead of scientists trawling to try to… More
IN THE ZONE: Exploring the cosmos with PrairiewolfThe Zone Poems media blitz rolls on! Prairiewolf — that band I’m in — is on the cover of the Caribou Current this month, glaring at you semi-menacingly. Managing Editor Jezy Gray’s feature turned out great, and photographer Tyler Hickman got some sweet pics of us up in Nederland. Go read the whole thing at cariboucurrent.com or grab a physical copy anywhere and everywhere around Boulder County. The Caribou Current rose triumphantly from the…
Why all the secrecy Around Short Circuit Current? This article has been on my to-do list since 2016. I had started it but, never finished. In 2016 IR meters started at $500.00 and went up from there. Today the very affordable Fnirsi HRM-10 or the Yaorea 1035+ represent an amazing value! I paid North of $400.00 in 2016 for my Yore 1035+ IR meter direct from China. Today, both of these meters are sub $80.00 One of the most overlooked specifications in the marine lithium battery market is short…
Some wonderful shoutouts for my Private Collectors, we are so here for JigZeni y’all! If you’re interested in a doodle like this, the beginning of the month is the best time to sign up!
Jeff Geerling is living the dream:
This is a collection of short stories, spanning a wide variety of characters and settings, all related to the Pakistani diaspora. I picked this one up not knowing much about it, but the title and cover intrigued me. I was pleasantly surprised. The stories were well-written and I never stopped reading one midway. There’s a tiny bit of overlap between them and a sliver of magical realism here and there, but they mostly read as either contemporary or historical fiction. The stories cover the…
OverviewThis week kept circling the same operational lesson: the boring control planes are where the damage starts. Remote support, SharePoint, phone systems, firewalls, Microsoft 365, developer packages, and AI workflow servers all showed up because they sit close to credentials, admin access, customer environments, or production data.Reality check: If a system can manage users, reach endpoints, route traffic, or run code on behalf of a team, it deserves faster patching and better logging than…
Now I need to pack up 93 books and send them to the company buying them.
Lo scorso aprile ho comprato una Nintendo Switch 2. E sì, mentre lo scrivo mi sto dicendo da solo e sti cazzi?
An email records what you sent. A text message records what you said. The chat log, the peculiar new artifact accumulating in evidence lockers across America, records something else entirely: a person thinking aloud to a machine that thinks back. In the Palisades wildfire arson trial, prosecutors reached into a defendant's ChatGPT history and pulled it into open court, treating the exchange like a diary the suspect never realized he was keeping.This is the strange threshold we've crossed. We…
My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily is live, entitled, “Five Ways Bad Ideas Lead to Good Ones.” It was a fun revisiting of Creative Doing, as well as ideas I wrote in some blog posts. In writing this one, I came up with the phrase “creative stupidity,” which was a riff on “productively stupid,” that has caught my attention. If you’re not feeling creatively stupid every so often—as well as experiencing the self-doubt that comes with it—then you’re not taking enough risk in your work. Developing…
Tomorrow is Independence Day here in the United States. It's a day when we celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the formation of our nation. Where we, as a people, assumed our sovereign political destiny from the tyrant King George III, and his sycophants, and forged our future in search of a more perfect union. It was on July 4th, 1776 that Congress issued what's now commonly known as The Declaration of Independence. A poetic, fiery assertion of that self-same destiny. Many people…
My view of Japan is cartoonish. It’s built almost entirely from exports and a European vantage point. When I watch how other countries portray France through their own exports, the caricature is cringeworthy, so it stands to reason mine works the same way in reverse. I’ve never had a Japanese friend. Growing up in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, most of my childhood friends were North African, Caribbean, Vietnamese or Cambodian, and rarely Laotian. Later, through work, I met and collaborated…
When I’m in the water and taking photos of things out of the water, I’m never sure whether there’s water on the camera housing. In this case, these three drops appeared in the photo, but I kind of like it!
In 1874 the Manor Park Cemetery Company (who still own and run the cemetery today) bought 115 acres of land on Hamfrith Farm from the British Land Company to open a new cemetery. The company quickly disposed of more than half of their new acquisition for the sum of £2939, enabling them to pay shareholders a dividend of 4% before they carried their first burial on March 25th 1875. The chapel was originally built in 1877 but was badly damaged by bombs in 1944, only the spire surviving intact. It…
My project was delayed, but my blog is officially running on Astro 🚀
Halfway through the year already and it is officially summer. 📃 Blog: Obviously quite limited, with only 3 posts since last time, though I am pretty pleased with all of them as they allowed to go a bit deeper in some things I love like spaghetti westerns and Isabelle Huppert. The Calvin & Hobbes was also mentioned in the podcast The Magic of Calvin and Hobbes in episode 21. Also not a whole lot has happened to shortsfreviews.com, but I am okay with that. It is there if I encounter a story I…
Alright, I’ll be straight up here. I didn’t play 007 First Light natively on the Steam Deck. I’d been following this game since it was announced and by all reports, the experience on the Steam Deck is pretty poor at best. Luckily, one of the Deck’s biggest strengths is that it’s dynamic. I also own a PlayStation 5 and make use of streaming for more demanding titles that don’t run well on the Deck… Source
The word "accountability" has many definitions that seem to mean roughly the same thing. If I knock your cupcake off the table, I should answer for the harm I've caused. The least I can do is apologize, notice what I've done and acknowledge the fact. But for me, accountability is also a reckoning with the consequences of my actions. When we seek accountability from others, we want them to right their wrongs. We want justice, whatever that means to us. Accountability shows up in so many places…
by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor As some of y’all might have noticed, Joanna Sodeman-Taylor is a fairly new name to be showing up on TFE and acting so familiar. So, happy Pride to me! The diva formerly known as Nick is now going by Joanna, and she's has the hormones to back it up. June may be over, but with my other major cinematic obligation with the Columbus Film Festival currently completed, I figured I should polish off my writings on two exemplary documentary shorts that deserve an audience all…
A classic string wall appears in the FMV game The Dark Side of the Moon (Tayanna Studios, 2021). ▲ The Dark Side of the Moon (Tayanna Studios, 2021) ▲ The Dark Side of the Moon (Tayanna Studios, 2021) ▲ The Dark Side of the Moon (Tayanna Studios, 2021) ▲ The Dark Side of the Moon (Tayanna Studios, 2021)
Last week, I saw this in the Substack newsletter published by Greta Johnsen. In the spirit of abundance and also fatigue, I have a question for you this week: what can you take off your plate? Are you doing something you “have” to do that you could actually let go of? Does the idea of doing less excite you? LEAN INTO IT. Maybe you can cancel a plan, or say no to something you feel obligated to do. Maybe you can give yourself permission to be ever so slightly less easygoing and a little more…
The top pitfalls I keep seeing when reviewing Agent Skills, and what to do instead
2026/07/03: It's Dog Food Day!
Rowan woke up on Saturday morning complaining about pain in his ear. Eri and I decided that I should take him to the ENT clinic that’s close to our house. I forgot you could book online (and so skip most of the waiting part) and so, as a result, Rowan and I ended up having to sit in the waiting room for almost two hours. This would have been difficult enough but after about 90 minutes, Rowan started complaining that his stomach hurt. Sure enough, he then proceeded to vomit. I managed to stop…
