September 2026 I had a good night sleep at the hotel and after breakfast, it was time to head back to Kunigiškiai so I could continue south from there. This is because this was the name of the village I got to yesterday when I walked from the airport. The quickest way to get there from where I was staying seemed to be to take the Airport Bus (route 31) to Palanga and then another bus from there. This is because the bus only continues from Palanga itself to the airport further north to connect…

I’ll be performing my first-ever solo electronic set as nightmother this Saturday evening at the Circuits in the Woods festival in Brattleboro, Vermont. (Er, at least my first IRL solo electronic set.) You can check out the festival info and schedule here: https://circuitsvt.org/ I’ll be playing at around 7pm at Wonky Press. It promises be a fun, weird set! Here’s some nightmother stuff you can check out to see if it might be up your alley. I do not promise to sound like this, but it’s probably…

The Medicaid program spends close to $1 trillion annually, with about 65% of that coming fom the federal government and the rest from state governnments. This is almost, but not quite, one-in-five dollars of total US health care spending. Medicaid is not quite as big as Medicare, which is about $1.2 trillion per year, but Medicaid alone is almost one-in-five dollars of total US health care spending. James Hamlette and Karen Kopecky offer a check check-in on the Medicaid program in “Who’s…

Yep it’s quite true. If you are just going to host one or two things, you could get away with a Raspberry Pi, but I have about 40+ containers running, and I realise I’m on my 3rd or 4th iteration of hardware. I don’t have anything fancy as my small form-factor server cannot even mount a GPU card. It was a squeeze to just add a riser card with an interface for SATA drives. Then I have two external 6 TB each NAS drives, another external USB drive for 4 TB backup as well, a UPS power supply, a…

Penny, the juvenile pigeon, came to us last week after being found in the city centre sitting on a windowsill all day, making no attempt to fly away when approached. At first, she wasn’t eating independently and I had to force-feed her by putting some defrosted peas in her mouth – she didn’t like this much and was definitely old enough to be feeding herself. So I gave her an iPad and played a pigeon loft YouTube video showing pigeons pecking at seeds. This did the trick! She immediately tried…

An elephant can dream.

Alena Belova sent me a link to her essay The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon and I thought it was interesting enough to post: Say ya qamar to someone in Arabic — you moon — and, at least in my experience of hearing it, it still lands, even as it starts to sound a little old-fashioned. Not like the moon. The moon. A whole face, a whole person, folded into the roundest, brightest thing in the night. The compliment is worn enough that it can be reached for the way an English speaker says…

Late night prototyping a front panel with a daisy chain for a (hopefully) soon-to-be-made bag. There was a casualty of a broken needle, which was supposedly a more durable one for thicker and backed fabrics, but it didn't survive multiple passes through the webbing and fabric. Filed under scraps with tags: Sewing Reply by email or on the Fediverse Add an emoji reaction: 🥕 🚲 🐾 💜

Matilda told such dreadful lies It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes...' [Hilaire Belloc] Last week my right eyelid was swollen and drooped over the eye (my sight, fortunately, was fine just obscured). Curious. Plantain and turmeric poultice applied under a patch. Right eye got a rest. So my other eye was 'single'. And it prompted two 'in-sights'.. how much my gaze online is pulled towards speculating on the merely human or ai-related or ai-generated (the latter of which I've got caught…

I bought a MikroTik hAP be lite router, which in the future I want to use to try segmenting our home network more, but to start with I want to use it as a 'dumb' access point (AP). There is a guide to configuring a standalone access point from MikroTik, but I'm not very experienced with networking, and new to MikroTik and their RouterOS (7), and this guide left more confused more than once. So these are my notes extending that guide to cover the bits that weren't obvious to me as a beginner.…

In this article for Michael West media, Claudia Weisenberger assesses the insatiable thirst for water of Australian data centres. Sydney Water is preparing for data centres to consume 25% of Sydney’s drinking water by 2035. Article: Waste tsunami. Water and the hidden cost of AI data centres. Take home quotes: No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. One large AI processing centre…

two trembling bodies tangled together arranging limbs in a way that the greatest amount of skin is touching skin sticky with a taste of salt bodies melting together into a bundle of pulse and breath I am open and raw and yours and with the sharpest inhale I swallow all the air in the room but you still have some left to exhale burning hot air onto me as I squeeze my eyes shut and fail to trap the weight of the waterfalls washing away the fantasy a wish, a dream, a drop of fragile hope

These are some good resources that I’ve found over time. All links tested and working as of October 18 2026.Easier food for folks who are sick or disabledLow Spoons RecipesThe Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die, a free ebook written by Zilla Novikov & Rachel A. Rosen, illustrated by Marten Norr. For people who have no energy to make food. Real about the struggle of taking care of yourself when sick or depressed. Nearly all vegan or offer vegan options.No More Ramen “a blog…

A small job this morning with Glorious Grasslands. We headed over to Pitchcombe to seed a small field squeezed between mill ponds and the Painswick road. The field had Longhorn cattle grazing who were super curious about what we were doing. Jenny and Alison went off to plant plugs while the rest of us spread the seed. We initially used a twisting tool to carve divots from the grass to create concentrated areas of bare earth for seed. However, the cattle decided they would brunch on the contents…

Listeners of ABC Radio National recently voted Cloudstreet, the 1991 novel by Fremantle based Australian author Tim Winton, to the top spot in the Top 100 Australian Books poll. Cloudstreet won a number of literary awards, including the 1992 Miles Franklin prize for Australian literature, and went on to be adapted for stage and television. It is quite the yarn: After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are…

Great day with Florian at Halde Rheinpreußen and Norddeutschland

First fire!

A quick preservation update thanks to Allan Pinkerton, who has been continuing his work to preserve a number of lesser-known Commodore 64 educational titles and other software. Allan has recently uploaded Word Games from MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation), bringing the number of titles he has preserved from the company so far to four. He is also hoping to add Friendly Computer soon, with a copy currently on its way from the UK. Other finds include Ducks, which appears to be…

While at OWASP Global AppSec EU 2026 in Vienna a couple of months ago, I picked up a copy of Izar Tarandach’s and Matthew J. Coles’ book “Threat Modeling: A Practical Guide for Development Teams”. I had dabbled into the topic from time to time but only very shallowly, and now I wanted to learn more. The book is roughly split into these six sections: General introduction into data flow diagrams, etc., for system modelling How threat modelling works in general Introduction to various…

Desk status

Earlier today I had a string of fraudulent "vinted" purchases against my AppleCard. The first two $17 and $35 transactions went through but the repeated transactions were bl ocked.Apple doesn't provide a good dispute mechanism in the wallet app. I called Chase, which was deeply unhappy and even rude. They are probably getting a lot of these and clearly hoped I'd confess to some kind of past relationship with Vinted (which would somehow absolve them). It sounds like I'll be, quite grumpily,…

Frying greasy Reibekuchen on the balcony.

By David Tuller, DrPH Olympic Sprinter Bedbound for 22 Hours a Day The BBC has profiled Beth Dobbin, a top-level sprinter who is, per the story’s headline, “now bedbound for 22 hours a day” with a severe case of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). In 2021, Dobbin, 32, represented Great Britain at the summer Olympics in Tokyo. […]

Q&A with Jeanie Finlay Stickers! On Sunday morning I read: The next Post Office scandal? Meet the fishermen fighting an ecocide, The Nerve. It’s about the Teesside developments, the sudden sea life die-off there, and the documentary exposing it.As luck would have it, that documentary, All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, was having a preview screening the same evening in Brighton. And a live Q&A with the director, Jeanie Finlay! We headed over and watched.Notes: I was aware of the…

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) allows you to vote for multiple candidates on a ballot, putting your favorite first even if you don't think they'll get elected. Without RCV, strategic voting is required - for example, voting for a Democrat instead of Socialist because you really don't want the Republican to get elected. There are electoral districts that have implemented RCV. In my state, some counties have RCV, even if statewide is choose-one. Any time we implement RCV, there must be a process that…

Books are a gift. Some of the best minds who ever lived wrote down their thoughts in the form of books, and you can often find them available for less than a tenner. When you stop and think about it, that’s incredible. Book clubs, though, are underrated. For nine years, I’ve had a roughly monthly book club with my friend Andy Henson, and others have joined us on and off. We’ve now read and discussed over 90 books, covering all sorts of subjects: Stoicism, mythology, psychology, history, music,…

Book title: The Guest Cat Author: Takashi Hiraide & Eric Selland Rating: 3.75/5 This is such a random, mundane book that I wonder if the author just took all his journal entries and added them together to make this novel. Which isn't to say that the book is boring. I just wonder how much of it is true. What is true is that it's very Japanese. Where to buy The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide & Eric Selland: Bookwise

UFO is a great game from 1994. Possibly the first, great turn-based tactics game.

Charlotte Tobitt, writing for Press Gazette, about subscription plans Meta introduced last month, that effectively monetise the posting of links from some Facebook and Instagram pages: Under the Meta One trial, those restricted from posting links would have to pay $49.99 (£37.65) per month to post eight links, $149.99 (£112.98) to post 20, or $499.99 (££376.60) for an unlimited number (alongside the other perks included). These are monthly fees, not annual. Three-hundred-and seventy-pounds —…