Folk Art Carving of pinup model Bettie Page c. 1955 - 1960 the most famous fetish and pinup model of the 20th century, but this is the only wood carving of her I have ever seen. Bettie Page Folk Art Carving c. 1955 - 1960 Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

In Episode 24, I chat with Alex, the author of alexsirac.com about, among other things, collective intelligence in public commons, what the IndieWeb can learn from Wikipedia, community in comments, and more. ↬web-weaving.jamesg.blog/24 Huge thanks to James for hosting a conversation with me on his Web Weaving podcast! We were supposed to talk about multilingual blogging, but we got completely sidetracked. Listen (or read the excellent transcript, thanks so much Zachary!) to the episode to hear…

Flying in or out of London over Christmas? The airports keep going, but the trains that usually get you there don’t (as much). Christmas Day has no trains at all, and in 2026 the Heathrow Express and the Elizabeth line to Heathrow are closed for engineering work from Boxing Day until 30 December. There are ways round it. Here’s what runs to Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City, day by day from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day, and what to know if you’re coming by Eurostar. Last…

So this happened yesterday. Today they're going to do the big assembly for the deck. A lot more work to do, and I'm unsure how it's all going to get done. But the beat goes on... ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:05 Tuesday, 20 October 2026

Getting a grip on asset class behaviour can be hard when there’s a fire hose of data gushing in from all angles, often from sources unknown, typically quoted in nominal US dollars (USD), and sliced and diced to suit the author’s purposes, not yours. So today we’ll try to swim against the tide by posting the long-term numbers for gold since 1900 – priced in pounds, fully cited, and accounting for inflation. This article can be read by selected Monevator members. Please see our membership plans…

Yet another trip down a rabbit hole courtesy of a random trip to a National Park Service web page: 1906 Earthquake Cottages. Just a reminder: as awful as that earthquake was, a lot of the worst damage to smaller buildings – wood-framed houses, for example – came from the fires that followed the quake. A lot of people were temporarily without housing in a city where every building had to be treated as potentially dangerous. Enter the cottages, miniature houses built of 2xs and plank that could…

Harley-Davidson (click to enlarge)Here are some recent random photos I made of subjects that simply caught my eye. Photos seem to be everywhere if you are sensitive to your surroundings.Sunken door. (click to enlarge)These sunflowers have seen better days. (click to enlarge)I wonder if they drive and not be looking where they are going as well? (click to enlarge)Five Hundred Sixty-Four Keys (click to enlarge)The Golden Driller in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (click to enlarge)Who needs electricity? Just…

I read the title of this article in the comments of an AI-coded Steam Deck plugin.I had to do a double take and nearly got whiplash. A comment like that is staggering in its implications. I had a major sense of déjà vu. I’ve seen this movie before, the ending is never about what got built. It's always about what got shipped.In my last article I said that AI has enabled the execution of all bad ideas quickly and easily. Now I want to explore the parallel between AI and Visual Basic (and the…

Growing up in the ’90s was wonderful. Horror was actively marketed toward us kids and teens, and we had all sorts of franchises like Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark to fuel our love of the macabre. One of my personal favorites was Are You Afraid of the Dark?, an anthology series on Nickelodeon that aired from 1990-1996 and again from 1999-2000. Each show began with a group of teens sitting around a campfire, and each week a different teen got to tell a story. The…

Three walks and a Civil Partnership Party in Brum. Two visits to Winchester for tech support and dinner with Aunty A. Panorama: Hatterrall Ridge from Tremorithic Admin on Tuesday morning, plus MCS quality audit for the ASHP and CW dropping by en route to Ross. Morning clouds and rain gave way to blue skies, big white clouds, sunshine and quite a breeze. Perfect drying weather, even if the unhung washing went flying over the west lawn in a particularly strong gust. Late lunch, then back to the…

As you may have gathered in previous instalments, I lived in France, Belgium, Greece, New Zealand, before being called by Germany. All of that at different times indeed. These were not tourist visits. These were long term stays where I grew roots and fully developed social activities. I always considering myself privileged and thankful to be able to roam the Earth, when I was accepted or not. As it happens the only place I came back to, and left because I felt not accepted, was my birth…

Ok, now that have your attention, it was actually more like “the time that the relays running indigo-relay, a codebase maintained Bluesky, tried to kill my PDS”. Because only some of them are actually operated by Bluesky, there are lots of independent ones running the same codebase! The story So I was minding my own business working on Kite when I suddenly get notifications that my server on Hetzner has been sitting at >95% total CPU usage over the last 10 minutes. I go to Grafana and find…

## The Big Idea Your startup is never in just one mode. Right now, some of what you've built is a throwaway experiment, and some of it is holding up the business. The hard part isn't building either kind. It's knowing which is which - because nobody will tell you when something crosses the line. ## The prototype in the subheader When we scope a project at [Craftwork](https://craftwork.com), one question is always the same: how many people, for how many days? It sounds like a calendar question.…

Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it. That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers. For the past few years, my RSS feeds have lived locally on my phone only. There was a good idea behind that, but it never quite worked in practice. For one, many things are easier to read on a larger screen. But it was also brittle to trust a phone app to…

It turns out the Environment Agency have done a LiDAR scan of England. They provide point clouds with 1 metre lat/lon resolution, showing the measured height of the terrain at each point, across the entire country. They provide both a DTM ("digital terrain model") and DSM ("digital surface model"), where the DTM has been somehow processed to only tell you actual terrain, while the DSM tells you heights including vegetation and buildings etc.; there is also a combined point cloud that gives you…

This is the second essay in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This essay is about fourth walls and magic circles. I wrote it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Spoiler Warning: This essay describes the ending of Tully State Forest by Ravensridge Press.In theatre, the fourth wall is the invisible barrier between the performers on stage and the audience of the play. When a character breaks the fourth wall, they typically…

There's a huge bias towards talking about people who were very notable or "successful" when young. So here are some interesting people who came through a little late.Kevin KellyI always admired Kevin Kelly's approach to work (than his actual work, which, while interesting, I haven't engaged enough with). His real notable breakthrough happened only when he was 31 when he was hired by Stewart Brand.Robert MosesNot everyone in this list is going to be a good guy. Robert Moses, by all accounts was…

The Klondike Highway winds through the foggy mountains near Skagway, Alaska. The post Foggy Mountain Highway appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

We have a PHPUnit test suite that's taking a while, so I wanted to find out the which tests were taking the longest. With the help of Google, I discovered the --log-junit phpunit-results.xml command line option to phpunit which creates an XML file with the info I need. Running on Slim's codebase, we create the XML file with: $ ./vendor/bin/phpunit --log-junit phpunit-results.xml ... Tests: 436, Assertions: 832, PHPUnit Notices: 37. It looks like this (formatted by me): $ head -n 7…

“One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.”–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea To receive the world is to allow it to leave a mark. In Amizdel, Charlie Rauh approaches that vulnerability as a practice of attention, gathering a year’s worth of memories and encounters into a record of learning to remain open. His introduction locates a quiet source of strength in the willingness to accept what others…

I get a lot of packages, so I sit staring at the Fedex tracking page a lot. They recently redesigned it (to become more “mobile first”, I guess — just a couple decades too late), and I’m just fascinated. I mean, it’s just a minor thing, and it doesn’t matter HANG ON: We’re on the Internet, right? OK, SO THIS IS LITERALLY THE WORST THING EVER LITERALLY. *phew* I was almost reasonable there for a second. But let’s go through what the page does: First we get a white web page. Then the page shows…

Not every video game I pick up manages to hold my attention long enough to reach the credits. There are many reasons for this: too boring, too long, not in the right mood, too difficult, too easy, my hardware platform suddenly failed, the friend I played it with stopped playing, … I realised today that I’ve got many of these so-called “dangling projects”. I’m making a list here to help myself get over the initial hurdle of picking them up again. Perhaps I dropped the game for the wrong reasons.…

Good news for anyone worried about my descent into philistinism: apparently I am capable of appreciating some contemporary painters! Zak Prekop: Julia Yerger: I’m not even enough of a visual arts expert to identify what sort of work this is, other than broadly abstract? What I know is that I like how they fall on the eye, and I like the impression both artists give of actually having spent a lot of time working on the canvas, rather than on their statement-of-intent. (Of the two, the Prekop is…

A song you’d like to hear covered by someone else. Which artist? Let’s start with a favourite song of mine, something I know very well as I’ve been listening to it for many many years. It’s a song that fully introduced me to a band that was still building it’s reputation, and which had just released it’s second album, and on that album was this song which still, to this day, brings goosebumps. As for who should cover it, I think it has to be something more than an acoustic stripped-back notion,…

Summer changed clothesovernight and without debate. Autumn slipped in, stripped naked and stood upright. Sky’s alive with vigor and might,breaking into a lustrous horizon. I wait by my window, yearning tosneak a peek at what Autumn has to offer.I am not disappointed.

Early Sunday morning, Chekhov’s lady friend Yellowbird passed away in a Seattle hospital; she was 84 and had been suffering from a variety of health problems for the past several years. Then last year, the problems began to multiply, and by the beginning of this summer they grew beyond the typical problems of age; early last week she was diagnosed with a terminal neurological disorder, and by Saturday morning decided to let nature take its course. So the hospital increased her pain medication…

A wish for my place flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Today is the National Day on Writing. Today, make a wish for your place. This activity is taken from the Write Where We Stand Choice Board Go outside where you are, take something to write with, and find a comfortable place to sit for a few moments. Take in your surroundings. What do you notice about your place? What do you notice about the natural environment and the…

It was a long time ago now. 1985. That's over 41 years that have passed. We were living in Bath, on Great Pultney Street at the time, and I was a mature but immature student on a Bristol University course. I was mostly eating jam donuts and larking about in between assignments. Every other lunchtime I'd go for a run along the canal, hurried on by younger and fitter fellow students.One Saturday morning my two little boys and I went out in our jet black and flimsy Fiat Panda, drove through the…

Charlotte Drummond is barely 17 when her grandfather dies, and because the estate is entailed and thus goes to a male heir, she and her mother go on living at Clonmara, despite knowing they will have to leave when their distant cousin, Richard Selwin, the new Lord Blodmore, takes possession.Read more »

In this post I provide a brief introduction to the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) format, discuss when and why you might want to use it, and then how to use the System.Formats.Cbor package in .NET. Background: data serialization and JSON Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a serialization format for data, so it takes structured data, and describes the series of bytes that represent that data. These bytes can be sent over the network or saved in a file (for example), and…