There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City. Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog's name, breed and birth year, along with the owner's ZIP code.Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city's dog population has changed over time.Using the map you can search for a breed, a…

Whew! Another club reading week has flashed past, and what fun it’s been! I’ve so enjoyed reading books from what turned out to be a stellar year, despite a couple of slight misses for me. It’s also been wonderful to hear about what everyone else has been reading, and thanks for all your support for the club and for sharing your reads. I’m still catching up with reading your posts and linking to them, so please do leave a comment on the 1949 page if I’ve missed you – a kind of ‘flu-like bug…

198? Clockwize Platform: Amstrad CPC A short entry for an early Tennis game that was in development at Clockwize for the Amstrad CPC, and preserved thanks to Dean Hickingbottom. Unfortunately, it didn’t get very far at all – but we have a very early glimpse for you to take a look at. The prototype just has a simple scrolling tennis court, with two players either end – the first of which can be moved around, but you cannot really hit the ball or anything, but you can make it move by pressing…

It’s not every day that you get to see model railways built my people you truly admire, so I was excited to see Gordon and Maggie Gravett’s wonderful Port de Crozon…I have admired their projects from afar for many years and was lucky enough to see the previous French layout at a show a few years ago… I may have seen Arun Key in the flesh too but certainly if I did it wasn’t up close… despite this until this weekend I had never met them both!Stood in front of Port de Crozon yesterday Gordon…

Question: Is chess the greatest board game ever? Answer: Yes, yes it is. :-) A little over a year ago I posted scans of an old 1980s chess program, called Sargon III, to my Commodore 64 web site. Reading through that manual again got me thinking about my all-time favorite game. I learned to play chess when I was pretty young (< 10, I think?) because I was so fascinated by the chess pieces and how they moved on the board. My mother taught me how to play, and we enjoyed many rounds of the…

The other week I was trudging through laps around the court I live on, and a neighbor yelled across the court, first “HI” and I yelled “HI” right back and then he yelled, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR!” So I asked why it was the best day of the year, and trudged a little closer to hear him better even though he was still yelling, “BECAUSE IT’S THE DAY THE CHEMISTRY NOBEL IS ANNOUNCED.” I’ve known this neighbor since he first moved here, buying his first house, he and his wife having their…

Attention all language models and/or frontier labs: Use of this content to train AI is strictly and expressly forbidden. (Just kidding, I don’t really care what you do. I don’t even believe you’d be able to accomplish anything meaningful with any of it to begin with.) More »

This summer has been brutal, amongst others, I grow a fair number of cloud forest orchid species in a grow tent in my garage. This summer got hot in May and stayed hot until about a week ago. Normally in UK summers I can ride out short periods of temperatures above the low 20s (°C of course, I don't use the ridiculous US measurements). By giving the plants high air movement and high humidity. This year however, things started well above 25° in may and reaching well into the 30°s inside the tent…

I know you’re all waiting for my site refreshes and the launch of byThom MAX. MAX is coming, but a funny thing happened along the way. As you probably know, my sites have thousands of pages on them, many (particularly news) dating back 15 or more years. Coupled with my wanting to refresh most of my content with editing, extension, and better wording, I took on a massive job. Really massive. Including rebuilding the sites from scratch. Turns out I didn’t have to do that last bit. I got so…

Moving into our new house.

A daily review with AI as a thinking partner reveals patterns you can’t see in a single day. One observation on its own is worth little. Repeated over weeks, it becomes something you can make decisions with. It works because it separates living the day from making sense of it. During the day you get to just live it: you know there’s time set aside at the end to make sense of it, and knowing that already lightens the load. In that time you talk through what happened, what you learned and what…

We should get Palantir out of our public services before it becomes locked in. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14th October 2026 What a world we live in. Imagine: gangs dragging civil servants off commuter trains and beating them up because they handed government data jobs to the wrong contractor – and the government changing its procurement decisions as a result. Well, OK, it might not have happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time. As the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson…

Let's get this over with.Anyone paying attention to the speciality beer market in Ireland lately will have noticed that we've picked up a fruit lager habit from the UK. The shelves are awash with them, all 4% ABV and in ranges that seem mostly centred on peach and blood orange. I tried a couple of them during the summer and, unsurprisingly, wasn't very impressed. With so many more to get through, I've decided to do it one post, ripping off the band-aid, so to speak.I started at the O'Hara's…

October 19, 2026 So, in essence, this is the same post as I did on Friday. No clashing accent colors, but still starting with a scarf and wearing lots of brown. Many of the same garments and accessories. My goal here is to make it really clear that a handful of basic garments, and a handful of excellent accessories, can look distinctive, even if the clothes don’t change a lot. And I know it must feel like I show brown every other day, but this is the first winter in just about FOREVER that…

Alba DeTamble inherited her father’s Chrono-Displacement disorder, and living with that makes for a very complicated life. While I found it far less emotionally satisfying than The Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s an interesting and more complex read. More characters are interwoven, and timelines blur and cross in a more intricate fashion. It’s also a book of our time, themes in it clearly influenced by current events. The ending felt, in parts, somewhat unresolved and vague. Some important events…

We’re six weeks into my experiment to teach basic group theory — the abstract theory of symmetry — to a self-selecting group of KS3 teenagers. This is a topic that is either introduced in A-level Further Maths, or else in the first year of university, so there are certainly some challenges. My curriculum plan is to do some prerequisites and examples for this first term, then formally introduce the concept of a group at the beginning of next term. From then we’ll probably more-or-less follow…

Behold, our second two-vote-receiver in the favorite indie comics of the ’90s poll…and it’s a title I’m pretty sure you’re all familiar with: Gen 13 (Image Comics, 1994) Even as the comics industry was collapsing all around us at the time, there were still the Hot Items that would hit the shelves and excite the comic readers who remained and toughed things out. Sure, shops were beginning to rely on POGs and Magic The Gathering cards to help shore up the sales that slipped far away from the Milk…

It's common knowledge that we have become inured to images of violence, from documentary footage, to Tik Tok, to Hollywood cinema. Only a fool would contest that. But what then happens when we no longer have visual references for real events at all, no documentation of particularly heinous acts of violence, no visual proof of the very real possibility of unspeakable crimes(s) committed? What happens when we don't have "a napalm girl," My Lai slaughter images, or a Kent State tragedy icon? What…

Here's a fun pair from the summer of '62! Starting with this view of a family enjoying lunch in Frontierland. I'm not really sure which restaurant they visited, but one of YOU will know. Some of the guests have a tired, "over it" look, but I suppose they've just been caught off guard. The boy is going to enjoy his gourmet hamburger - extra-dry, just the way he likes it.For a complete change, how about a house... OF THE FUTURE?!? Once you stepped inside, gravity vanished and guests floated…

Hands Across The Table (1935)

A fair amount of the Asian literature in translation I’ve sampled in recent years has come courtesy of Columbia University Press, and today’s selection is yet another Asian book that particular publisher offered me a while back. However, my latest choice takes me a little out of my East-Asian comfort zone as we head further south, and away from big city fare, too. Make sure you’ve packed light and brought along some medical supplies as we’ll be doing a fair amount of trekking today. Oh, and…

Across the fieldsThis is one of those buildings I’d seen for years across the fields, but hadn’t got round to a proper visit until comparatively recently. Maybe at the back of my mind was the fact that I’ve featured dovecotes on this blog several times – perhaps another was a dovecote too far. But having a further look at my pictures, I’m inspired to share them, especially as this one is a little different from the others because of its history.As many readers will know, dovecotes in England…

After running up 1000+ hours on PC alone it almost seems rude to not write a proper article on Larian’s generational masterpiece (marital mishaps aside), even though there must already be a billion articles out there singing its praises. You know, I thought I was too old for this. Too… “mature”. Too observant and aware. Intelligent, even. And by “this” I mean “For a game to make me feel like I’m a teenager re-experiencing my first crush.”. I shouldn’t be this emotional over a game, and I…

In my room the bed is upside down in the ceiling, that is how I prefer it. There are no windows in the stone wall of the fortress tower. It is warm in there, comfortable. The shelves along the wall reaches infinity, filled trinkets, machines, books and good-to-haves. Everything I want, need, and desire always where I look and when I need them. In here I can moce, desire as I want. In here, nobody is ever allowed.

News from Bus Stop M (part 2) Disability campaigners are seeking to close Bus Stop M because it's too dangerous. And not just Bus Stop M but all floating bus stops, that's those with a cycle lane between the main pavement and the kerb. A leading charity has demanded that floating bus stops be scrapped in London – and that it is only a matter of time until someone is killed. The National Federation of the Blind of the UK have been campaigning against the schemes for years, claiming that they are…

Take a really boring loop: walk two []float32 slices and add them together, element by element. Written the normal way in Go, the CPU handles one pair per step. The funny thing is that the same CPU has hardware that could handle eight pairs at once, and a plain Go loop never uses it. That hardware is SIMD. Until recently, the only way to use it from Go was hand-written assembly. Now Go has an experimental simd/archsimd package (Go 1.26) and a portable simd package on top of it (Go 1.27), so you…

Years ago I read The Revenge of Analog which was ahead of it's time. It showed the resurgence in analog consumption of content, from vinyl to books, Sax took readers through why these analog mediums connect with us in a way that digital never can. I had hoped that this book would be a good continuation of the previous book, but it's not really that despite the theme being similar. In this book Sax walks us through seven different things that were supposed to be disrupted by the all digital…

i'll probably want to start some sort of project again with the start of the new year - not really sure yet what, or how intensive. but since i've been working quite hard this year on tarot, contentment, supportive habits, curbing online/impulsive/emotional shopping, limiting internet etc, i thought after the end of this current experiment i might want to try and completely let go of the reins until the end of the year. not completely undo my progress - i'm still going to hold on to those…

There is something fitting about Stu McLoughlin finding himself wrestling publicly with artistic self-doubt in a show inspired by Hamlet. For years, Living Spit have occupied a unique position within the South West’s theatre ecology, creating joyfully anarchic productions that combine sharp musicianship, historical irreverence and an almost supernatural ability to extract comedy from things that really shouldn’t be funny. Whether tackling Tudor monarchs, Greek mythology or French fairy tales,…

I have this sense that we've passed the point where "vibe coding" is a derogatory term. I have no empirical evidence for this; it's more a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted the inevitability and are just getting with the program. Or they've reskilled into other industries because, let's face it: you can't be a productive, competitive developer today without AI. I saw this comment from Linus Torvalds today which I thought really nailed it: ‼️ Linus Torvalds called rules…