I've been wanting to get back into bread baking again, but haven't had much time for it since I would make it all by hand. The recipe I've used before was for a sifted white flour, which kneading by hand isn't so bad, but it can still be time consuming. Today I'm interested in making whole wheat bread, which includes everything of the wheat berry. I attempted this once before about five years ago and ended up with a dense loaf of bread that wasn't good for much, but this was because I didn't…

Time has a peculiar way of inhabiting music, gathering in the hollows between notes and returning through melodies whose origins have long since dissolved into memory. For pianist Alan Pasqua, whose career has traversed the incandescent frontiers of jazz fusion and the intimate architectures of acoustic improvisation, such temporal hauntings find exquisite expression in My New Old Friend. Having studied with Jaki Byard and joined Tony Williams’ New Lifetime following a fateful Carnegie Hall…

Happenings Again, this is double entry, so it covers two weeks I think. Most of it was just work though. Had my parents round for TV and video games. My dad was too tired to make progress on his game, so he watched me play Nier: Automata, a game he seemed very impressed by. We bought a cheap record player stand. I had tried to build one myself (more like a riser to sit the turntable on so the amp could go underneath), but, well, it turns out carpentry is hard. Even after making perfect cuts,…

Snow-capped mountains tower in the sky at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The post Majesty Beyond the Trees appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I work on a shared project with many other developers in my organization. Its shared instructions added up to roughly 13,200 tokens, including workflows for Claude Code. My personal Codex harness uses about 670 tokens, a 95% reduction in instruction text, without changing everyone else’s setup. The shared guide could be trimmed too, but that’s for later. My personal harness has 2 parts: short instruction overrides and automatic worktree setup. Override the project instructions Codex loads…

Big City Dilemma Big City Dilemma is a collaboration between poet Jeremy Reed and music auteur known ubiquitously as Itchy Ear. The collaboration is called The Ginger Light. It is a mix of visuals, sound and sonic qualities, of the visual and aural qualities of Jeremy Reed’s poetry. 1 This is a cd of their very successful performances, sampling vox pops with studio sounds, reverb and performance-time readings, bringing in sung choral lines, stutter of electronics. Performances incorporate…

Sigma today introduced the FP2, a complete redo of their earlier camera-in-a-small-box. The box is similar, losing just a bit of depth and only .2 ounces (6g) heavier. The fp name of the earlier model is now an uppercase FP. Out back, the Rear LCD now tilts. But it’s inside where the real changes lie. The FP2 uses the 24mp partially-stacked image sensor pioneered by the Nikon Z6III (which Panasonic also now uses). This opens up 6K open gate at up to 60P, as well as Apple ProRes RAW recording.…

Prologue #Like last year, I livetooted the release of Python 3.15.0. Here it is in blogpost form! Two weeks #Two weeks until Python 3.15.0 final! #Python #Python315 Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 00:30 EEST One week #One week until Python 3.15.0 final!! What are you most looking forward to? #Python #Python315 Tue, Sep 22, 2026, 21:17 EEST Python 3.15.0 release day! #First blocker, we’re getting 503s on docs.python.org and buildbot.python.org, the latter of which is needed to check the tier 1 and 2…

In October, we always listen to Thelonious Monk. His birthday is October 10th and I associate his music with the arrival of fall. Since this year is the Coltrane Centennial, it makes sense to listen to Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (1961) which is really an outstanding album. I’m particularly fond of “Off Minor” and “Epistrophy” where Coltrane is paired with Coleman Hawkins. Just check it out, if you haven’t (and I guess you have). The crazy thing is that this is second best album recorded…

APC EA200 OVA: Here's a guitar that I picked up dirt cheap on eBay a few years ago. It needed some work. It's hand made and a rare, in their range, steel strung guitar from APC Luthiers in Portugal. I used it on the Collection album for a couple of things that were in a drop D tuning, then stuffed it into a case at the back of the cupboard and quietly forgot about it. I just looked at it again the other day and I've given it a fret tidy, a new nut, new strings and reset the action. The pickup…

LO SPETTRO/THE GHOST is Riccardo Freda’s OTHER film about Dr. Hichcock, but this Dr. Hichcock is not the same one as in THE HORRIBLE (SECRET OF) DR HICHCOCK, nor is Barbara Steele’s Mrs. Hichcock the same Mrs. Hichcock. Their first names are different, Bernard and Cynthia giving way to Charles and Margaret. We also have […]

💬 “Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 89.3. Cited by Michel de Montagne in ‘On Experience’ in The Essays: A Selection. Trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2004. 3.13, 366. This is true, potentially, of writing notes. It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge. The solution? Link your notes and create hub or structure notes (there is a difference — see Bob Doto’s post for details) that cluster separate ideas together…

The first week of October 2026 saw me making the long haul up the M1/A1 to Newcastle for my first visit in many a year. Lower league football on Saturday had tempted me in this direction, with plenty of time to explore Tyneside on Thursday and Friday. Not nearly long enough, I quickly found out.After a side-mission to Swalwell Lidl's on instructions to pick up a Bavarian beer box before they all sold out, I made it into the city centre and negotiated the narrow ramps of the Travelodge Central…

Bokkerijders: Crush Kill DestroyOut 23rd October on Personal Records The debut album from this Belgium outfit smuggles in a surprisingly broad sweep of meditative, melodic, emotive black metal beneath a superficial façade of old school speed metal. Initially we are taken in by the homebrewed energy of Aura Noir or Merciless, only to be swept off into ambient, folk, and atmospheric territory by the second half of the album as epic tracts gradually stretch their limbs, sometimes reminiscent of…

I’ve recently gotten into swapping art with people. This is through the Reddit Print Exchange, Postcards from Afar and Postcrossing. In the latter case, quite a few people have requested photos of trams. Well, we have a tram here, so I thought I’d go out, shoot a roll of film and see what I could come up with. The photo above isn’t a technical wonder but it’s the one I keep coming back to for some reason. I wish it had a foot or so more breathing room to the left, but that’s life. I was already…

Just a reminder that on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the war it caused was already 21 years in the past, Japan and Germany had largely been rebuilt and become allies, and the economic costs of the war were largely behind the US (though not Europe or Asia). — Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T17:44:58.998Z I think scientists should lock RFK into a Skinner box to test this. Of course, several other Trump henchmen will need to be similarly-confined as a control group.…

A desire path is an unofficial route, or trail, worn into the ground by the repeated passage of people or animals. In the urban landscape, a desire path will be worn where a carefully planned, but perhaps convoluted, footpath takes the long way round, and people simply cut that aesthetic route short. Desire paths can occur even where no path exists at all and that is usually true with the paths wild animals create in their landscape. The obvious rhetorical question is why follow that winding…

Christopher Lee as Dracula.The idea of inserting Count Dracula into a groovy 1970s London setting was a potentially intriguing idea. Unfortunately, by the time Hammer Films produced Dracula A.D. 1972, the premise had already grown stale. The contemporary-set Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and its 1971 sequel had already been released, with the former earning respectable reviews. Blacula (1972), another well-received, modern-day vampire film, debuted in American theaters a few months before…

I’ve had many memorable conversations in pubs, and about pubs, and one particular such exchange from a few years back still stands out. I’d been arguing the case that JD Wetherspoon was a social asset because its low prices helped bring all types of people together. The other party – whoever they were, but certainly…

Most people think trading means you need to be active. You sit in front of several screens, watch every price move, and buy and sell stocks all day. I do the opposite. Sure, I follow the market every day. I read earnings reports, look at charts, and track companies. But I don’t trade daily. My goal is to find one or two good opportunities a year. That’s all. That also means that I don’t find any opportunities most of that time. That’s fine because my long-term investments keep compounding in…

Pondering test data selection Last week I talked about two strands of work on the habitat map work: improving the robustness of my validation approach, and integrating eBird into my occurrence data alongside that from GBIF. I spent some time wrapping up those bits, and am now quite pleased with where we are. One interesting thing that fell out of all this was there's a subtle but interesting decision point as to when in a pipeline to split out your test data from your training data. Looking…

A new research paper titled “​AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance,”​ which was recently presented at the ​Conference on Language Modeling​, has been attracting attention. It explores an obvious question: do AI tools negatively affect your ability to think? It does so with a simple experimental design: participants were divided into two groups tasked with solving a series of math problems involving fractions. One group had to find answers on their own, while the…

Autumn Leaves flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Write Out recently a workshop by teachers who use a traditional Hawaiian observation practice called Kilo alongside their students. What are your observation super-powers? Or which ones do you tap into most to support your writing? Learn more about Kilo The one I use most is sight, and I often use my camera to help me to focus on details of my surroundings. On Saturday, as we…

Above you see the nice li’l machine that has a nice SAS card that I’m using for my /dvd RAID (that, confusingly enough, has more ripped blurays than ripped DVDs now). Here’s the major, incredibly important problem: If there’s been a power outage (for instance, because I’ve had an electrician in to do something), the machine refuses to boot because the BIOS doesn’t know what date it is. I’m sure that’s really important! Oh my god! What would we do with a machine where the BIOS doesn’t know what…

I played a lot of Mahjong this week - and not really on purpose... it just kinda happened lol. The week was actually weirdly productive and I locked the fuck in at work. I also picked up some AirPods Pro 4 kinda ... on a whim to help me lock in better in the office + for when I run. But like otherwise,,, it was kinda a lowkey week. We had some1 over, and we played sanma Mahjong w them - beginner game but still fun! On the weekend we did a big group dinner with a bunch of the homies and ALSO on…

Have you ever done something for years and still felt like you weren’t getting any better at it? I’ve been reading Grit by Angela Duckworth recently and really enjoying it. One idea in particular has stuck with me - deliberate practice. You’ve probably heard the claim that it takes around 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. It’s a neat idea, but it raises an obvious question. Say you’ve been out for a run every other day for the last 10 years. You’ve easily clocked up more than…

Hit The CityTo complete the Wyre Valley Line Railway Stations Walk, I need to plot a short walk between the Jewellery Quarter and Moor Street, via Snow Hill Station. A short city walk, with plentiful distractions. To avoid turning it to a lengthy pub crawl, I'll combine my investigations with the latest History West Midlands Podcast. The political dynasty of the Chamberlains is the topic, with my walk concentrating on Joseph.The Chamberlains were one of Birmingham’s most influential political…

In 1992, Dynamix and Sierra On-Line released Johnny Castaway. Your Windows 3.1 PC went idle and Johnny fished, slept, built rafts, and got into trouble on his island. As a young kid, I came across him during a summer holiday trip to my parents' office. Thirty-four years later, he is hard to visit. Sharing it with my kid means dragging a beige tower out of a closet or faffing about with a virtual machine. That is enough friction that almost nobody bothers, and a far cry from the little moment of…

The tool is an expansion of Attie, Bluesky’s more experimental platform, which initially offered AI-powered technology for building custom social feeds. With its new creation capabilities, the idea is to allow everyday users to create the kind of experiences that previously only software developers could build. These user-created games, sites, and other experiences will also live on the same AT Protocol (ATProto) that powers Bluesky and other decentralized social apps that make up the…