exhausted I'm writing from the couch on my phone. I hate typing on my phone. That's how tired I am. Today's choir rehearsal was extremely physical. Like we were doing some Cirque du Soleil type shit. I laughed a lot. Learning to relaxSpeaking of physical stuff, I started working with a new physiotherapist. I wrote about it. I really need to learn how to relax my body. For example, during choir we made a massage train. The person massaging me gasped when she touched my shoulders. "What is going…

Over the past few months, tracks by British Birds have consistently made my ears prick up when I've been drawing along to Riley and Coe's show on BBC6.Despite the tourists taking selfies on the street down to Portobello Road, very little has changed over the years: there are still stalls selling sliver cutlery tied up in bundles, boxing gloves with a stall to themselves, vintage magazines, old-fashioned china tea-sets, hats, grumpy stall holders and a line of very cheap fruit and vegetable…

Anyone else notice that people don’t flash lights at oncoming traffic to warn about a speed trap? (I still do.) Has this practice just been forgotten or is it the result of thin blue line propaganda? I remember when country folks and cops weren’t friendly. Not hostile, but certainly not trusting.

To celebrate the spookiest month of this year, it seemed like a good idea to take on the Prime Evils of Sanctuary. It’s been more than five years since I did a few Mephisto runs together with friends. Does this game still hold up, more than 25 years later after its initial release? Even the fresh lick of paint called Resurrected is five years old now. I don’t have a modern Windows machine, and unfortunately, Blizzard decided with the remaster to skip macOS, leaving me with the Switch version to…

Not sure if this is a British thing, but I love a good bivouac.53 words · 3 images

It seems like lifetimes ago when they were still a thing, but I remember way back yesteryear when a lot of times sites would have a guest book. I created a guestbook for this website some time ago but only just now got around to linking it. Feel free to browse it and sign it if you wish. Just don’t be a dick and spam. Long before social media was a thing they were interesting to read when you came across an interesting site. There are often links to similar ones. Spam wasn’t big yet. Social…

Between tool calls, coding agents find 90 to 99% of their input already cached. After an hour away, one public trace finds 18%. A dated field guide to what agentic inference work measures, and what it skips.

Why the cheapest punch in boxing is the most misunderstood idea in corporate strategy Nobody has ever been carried out on a stretcher by a jabWatch a boxing highlight reel and you will see the last three seconds of a forty minute argument. The overhand right. The hook that arrives from outside the frame. The moment the legs stop being legs. What you will not see, because nobody edits it in, is the punch that was thrown more times than every other punch combined. The jab does almost no damage.…

If you are using Unix Domain sockets on Linux, and you are not accepting file descriptors from these Unix Domain Sockets (which is the common case), you should probably disable the SO_PASSRIGHTS socket option to turn this feature off. The underlying problem is: When SO_PASSRIGHTS is enabled, and a sender process sends a file descriptor using SCM_RIGHTS, it becomes part of the receiving process. If the recipient then does not actually read the file descriptor, the receiving process implicitly…

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is a hard book to describe. Many people will want to read it because it’s a finalist for the 2026 Booker Prize. At around 200 pages, it’s a quick read in print, and just under four hours on audio. However, before buying, I highly recommend reading the sample offered by Amazon. I also recommend reading the reviews in Locus Magazine and The New York Times. The writing is clear and excellent, but the story is surreal, metaphorical, and ambiguous. The End…

Regular animations are triggered immediately (or after a time delay), and a time duration determines the progress of the animation. Scroll-driven animations animate between two points on the page based on the user’s scroll position, the triggering element’s position determines the start, end and progress the animation. Scroll-triggered animations are animations that are triggered by the active range of the trigger element. While they are triggered they run on a regular, time-based animation…

VisionQuest, like its narrative forerunners, WandaVision and Agatha All Along, dips in and out of reality and asks us to believe in a digital world as well as a real one. With AI suddenly front and centre in the news it makes the show even more timely than the previous chapters. For those who may be less up to date with the lore relating to this most unusual character, the first episode of this new miniseries provides a succinct update, with clips, that tells you what you need to know. It’s an…

The hardest part about going to Disney World is waiting in lines, especially when you're under ten years old and each minute feels like forever. When I was at Disney World recently, I saw lots of parents passing the time with their kids by playing Heads Up. I decided to download the app and do the same thing with my kids. After loading it up, I was immediately turned off by all the upsells. I get that they're trying to make money, but I don't want to pay for a simple game like this. So what did…

An unexpected effect of the (not so) new job: I’m rarely in Bloomington anymore. It was such a big part of my life for thirty years. Now I’m there less than once a month. So many cool things in that town but now I think, “All the way to Bloomington? In that traffic?” 😄

As mentioned in my previous article, I spent much of Friday enjoying a day out in the lovely and easy‑going town of Faversham. It’s not the simplest place to reach by rail from Tonbridge: two changes are required, the first at Paddock Wood, from where an interesting journey unfolds. This is where the line follows the sinuous course of the river Medway for a good stretch, offering glimpses of water, marsh, and industry as the train heads towards Rochester. The second change takes place at…

Originally Written July 2001 For nearly three years now, Kenneth Hite has been writing Suppressed Transmissions – a column which can be found, each and every week, in the digital pages of Pyramid Magazine. For those of you unfamiliar with the column, I find it almost impossible to explain the experience: Hite takes a plethora of historical fact, teases it out with imaginative alternatives, spices it with every possible nuance of conspiracy, stirs in a bit of secret history, adds a touch of…

I noticed in the replies to a Bluesky post recently that people are misreading certain polls in a way that drastically overstimates the support for Trump—and it’s not his supporters doing the misreading in this case, but his critics. A YouGov poll in September asked the question “How popular is Donald Trump in Western Europe?” and graphed the results by net favourability, showing −67 for France, −74 for Spain, −75 for Britain, −76 Italy, −78 Germany, and a spectacular −91 for Denmark. Some…

This wasn't written with AI, let alone by AI. It's just me. Typing, no less, not even dictating like all the cool kids do. My line of work is being significantly re-shaped by AI, but one of the hard lines I continue to draw for myself is that the writing I publish remains written by me. Not because I think AI is all hype. It isn't! But I do believe it's substantially misguided, buoyed by nonsensical economics, driven by shallow incentives, and unleashed with poor taste on a bunch of exhausted…

But first, Minuet. This is what most weekend days look like. If I'm lucky, I get to grab coffee first. A list of unfinished thoughts. People don't remember you if you don't show up COVID may be causing long-term frontal lobe damage would explain lack of higher reasoning and other BS like not signaling when you change lanes If I do drop the info sec part of my job, I'm going to have to find a team again with my accessibility responsibilities being more diverse and not application-specific We had…

It turns out you can find a solution to The China Labyrinth puzzle if you do not worry about the border.

My recent book AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview is free online today and tomorrow (through Oct 19, presumably UK time). I don't think the hard copy is available yet. Get it while it's free! Here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/ai-and-consciousness/E77C92088DA3C9F89E7FE7C75CBB1896

Here I am again avoiding the things I don’t want to do. I don’t want to clean this apartment. I moved in and it was, not spotless but pretty close to. Now, there are dishes spread out, some in the sink some in the dishwasher some on the table. The garbage is full, a McDonalds bag is on the island that is full of garbage. The dryer is open full of clothes I left in there for a week. The washer I’ve been using as a laundry basket. There is a pile of old computer stuff laid out in front of the tv.…

For the first-time traveler to Hawai'i, a word about the birds. There are two groups of birds, the species native to the Hawaiian Islands, and the introduced, or invasive species. There are also two groups of birds, the ones you are likely to see during your trip, and the ones you won't. It's unfortunate, but the two lists are pretty much the same. The native birds of the islands are under assault, and most of them never were a good fit for urban environments where island visitors spend most of…

19:51 - Finally home. We had a very active choir rehearsal today. Gonna rest here for a few hours.

All right, I'm a bit late this year, but our family tradition of watching scary[-ish] movies in October is alive and well. Sadly, the LA Angels missed the playoffs just like last year. Super hopeful for the 2027 season though. This year's theme is... Body Horror I've always been a fan of the genre, but I feel like I've never really dug too deep into it. I wanted the list to include some of the classics, things we've seen but not within the last year or so, and to have similar themes grouped…

Things have gotten busy. Pokemichi consumed my last few weeks along with helping my sister out with some efforts. I also really miss tumblr. So in that spirit, gurupanguji.com now supports micropub to reduce post friction.

Sometimes we give ourselves many options in life, just in case. One example is having hobbies in case our job doesn’t work out. And of course, on top of that, we have the feeling that we could do anything we want in life. But soon we come to the point when our job is really not what we want to do with our life, and we want something else. When we open that door of possibilities, it looks like a supermarket shelf packed with so many different things that you can’t even see what’s on it. Here,…

On the matter of the blorbos in your head, here's a piece of advice you might want to follow or disregard completely: you don't have to let them out. Let's say you want to make a game. You want to write a book. You have your OCs you love dearly1, but everything you have in mind mostly exists right there. I'm a firm believer that if you just keep on polishing an idea forever no one will ever see it, and that sucks; lately I've come to think a bit differently and question the why. I've made quite…