Archaeology magazine, vol 61, no. 6, Nov/Dec 2008 has a cool article about UK witchcraft.
The encoding finally finished! [20:44:04] Finished work at: Thu Aug 6 20:44:04 2026 [20:44:04] libhb: work result = 0 Encode done! HandBrake has exited. Took about 7 days to encode 56 DVDs from VIDEO_TS folders into more modern .mkv format, using H.264 to save on space. It looks like the .mkv files are quite a bit smaller than the source material: $ du -sk */ | awk '{s+=$1} END {print "Original Folders: " s/1024/1024 " GB"}' Original Folders: 277.174 GB $ du -sk *.mkv | awk '{s+=$1} END {print…
Looks Unfamiliar with Georgy Jamieson talking to Tim Worthington about the EKCO Hostess Trolley, Terry's Spartan, A Sharp Intake Of Breath, John Cleese's How To Win Holes By Influencing People, Charlie Chester's Sunday Soapbox, the lost art of tuning your radio in to the television signal and more...!
Mao Zedong, in his statements, talked about peasantry being the main force of Chinese revolution. Peasantry, and not the urban proletariat was the main character - in a stark contrast both to classic Marxism, and to the mainstream Marxism-Leninism of the era.Why? What was even his point?Surface reading: he was waging an abstract theoretical discussion, academic style, and made an abstract statement of abstract truth.Actual reading: no, it was not some kind of theorising into the void. It was a…
Not captured in these words or images are the conversations you have with lifelong friends that tackle everything from the lightest to the weightier topics... not heavy, just important.Currently Listening: Charlie xcx “Camera”Reply via email
I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in January, and I’ve made it to the fourth volume – published in Danish in 2022, and in translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell in 2026, making it perfect for Women in Translation Month. (Incidentally, I wonder why the translators have changed since the first volume?) Here are my thoughts on the books in…
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #117, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web. To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed. You can reach out to me by replying to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon. In a day including the…
A few more microfictions, still no LLMs. “Keeper of the Living Collections,” the job posting read. “Must always be in a good mood.” He called to inquire. “Ah, yeah. We can’t figure why, but the trees will only grow to songs of True Joy.” At first, bottled moments seemed like an exciting new industry. “Bottle of flopping onto the couch after 12 hours on your feet” sold like mad, and moment factories sprouted across the country. It all came crashing down once “bottle of baby’s first laugh” was…
Twenty Poets of Argentinaed D Samoilovich and A Graham-Yool, Redbeck Press 2004 This is best kind of book; the Introduction not only gives us a thorough background to modern Argentinean poetry, but also invaluable notes on the poetics used, so often missed in translations. The poets are chosen by having published two plus books by the time of translation; and so, as this book took four years up to publication, it is by necessity a book about history.In Latin America this has significance.It was…
The Host KnowsOur latest dog-sit brings us to Cucklington. It's quite possible over the three-day weekend that we may be able to do a walk in three different counties.We start in Dorset. During the introductions and our host listens to my planned walks at Castle Cary and Bruton. I can tell he is unimpressed and ask him where we should go. Shaftesbury is mentioned, but we have recreated bread advents. Then he says "Sherborne". We've never been. Plans are changed.We can tell on the drive in to…
This is a letter I wrote years ago in response to a challenge. For it you had to write something to a quality you wished you had more of.I've rewritten it to reflect who I am today.What would your letter be to?Dear courage,I thought I’d write a letter to you instead of diving into my life to find stories that will put me in your light.That is so hard to do as I don’t see myself as a very courageous person.You see, courage, as I’m writing this I am in bed, comfortably miserable. Days on end of…
PulpFest 2026 was a landmark. The convention drew 486 attendees — about 350 preregistrations and the rest walk-ups. That’s a record for PulpFest and its predecessor, Pulpcon. I’m on the organizing committee, and we announced the figure during our look ahead to next year on Saturday evening. As I’ve said before, PulpFest is the people […]
We drove our coach 206 miles / 332 km, about four hours of driving, from a boondocking spot in the parking lot of Mount Begbie Fire Lookout near 70 Mile House to MamaYeh RV Park & Campground near Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. Here’s a map showing our route, heading north: An interactive map, with potential stops pinned: Begbie Summit elevation 1232 m (4041 ft): Barn and 130 Mile Lake: Williams Lake rest area: Turn to Prince George: Interesting rocks: Bridge over Quesnel River: River…
Cassowary, CasuariiformesWherever you are in the world, it is likely that you know your local birds. True, you may call them des Oiseaux, pássaros or uccelli — but you'll know their common names by heart. You will also likely know their sounds. The tweets, chirps, hoots and caws of the species living in your backyard. Birds come in all shapes and sizes and their brethren blanket the globe. It is
Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo, Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13. Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and with the current component pricing insanity, I'd be surprised if we don't see a price increase on both laptops by next year. I ran the XPS 13 through my gauntlet of benchmarks, and published a review on my YouTube channel:
The C64 Appreciation Society continues their playthrough of the first Bard’s Tale. (23 minutes) If you want to start from the beginning, they’re collected in this playlist. (7 items) I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobber,…
Sometimes I see a video of someone doing something and immediately think, why didn’t I think of that sooner? One such thing is the idea of a “gift closet,” which is a collection of items you have that are meant specifically for gifting to other people on such occasions as: bringing a hostess gift to a friend’s house, setting a gift on your guest room’s bed for your visiting friends/family to be surprised with, a gift for your kid’s teacher on Teacher Appreciation day, nice moments like these…
It’s a jolt, this religion, if it works in the spirit like God means it to. Against the world. This world appears to be a test of faith, a trial for the one to come. We believe there’s a mighty judgement coming, that the world will be made new, and that all these hearts in hell can be turned by the grace of God, who is waiting for every soul, here and now. We believe in the resurrection of the body and in life everlasting. I’m as guilty as the next man, guilty as Cain. Every day I live with…
Previously during the Advent of EIP I covered the Claim Check Pattern as part of Day 5: Message Types & Event Payload Strategies. In that write up I left the implementation purposefully simple: write the document to S3 and include the S3 address in the payload for the consuming side to receive and fetch the bytes. This is a pattern I have used time and time again and it works well regardless of whatever object store you use and is very simple for your team to reason about.
Surprising but true: in 2025, all net new electricity generation added worldwide was clean, ie non greenhouse gas emitting. 99% was renewable! 75% solar, 24% wind. It was actually over 100% total. We added 849 TWh of generation overall in 2025, an increase of 4.5%, but GHG emitting (ie fossil fuel) generation shrank by 0.2%. Clean energy covered the gap and then some. Even more surprising: this was true for China and India individually too. All of their net new generation added in 2025, and…
Great show Wednesday night — August 5, 2026 — at Mr. Tipple’s (SF), a quartet led by bassist Billy Edwards, with Rico Jones (tenor sax), Joe Warner (piano), and Sylvia Cuenca (drums). Jamal Ramirez was listed as drummer on the venue’s site, but something must have come up. And then, during the second of two sets, trumpeter Joel Behrman joined for “Blue Monk” and stayed until the end. (Behrman’s group, Currents, played earlier that evening at Black Cat, about a mile away.) Warner did expert…
I was never good at being young but I’m going to be great at being old.
TL;DR As Internet of Things (IoT) devices become more commonplace managing the risks they bring becomes more of a bother. I’ve chosen to deal with this by having different network zones for different trust levels; implemented mostly with OpenWrt. But it’s still a compromise where various security risks are accepted as OK given the effort it would entail to deal with them properly. Background I came across a Mastodon thread from Terence Eden that referred back to his excellent post ‘Designing a…
Somewhere in a lot of British lofts and charity shops, there's a battered hardback called Jane Asher's Fancy Dress. Flip past the introduction and you'll find grown adults, several of them recognisable working actors, standing in front of a plain studio backdrop dressed as a rock salmon, a jailbird and a pixie on a toadstool. It's not a spoof. It's a genuine 1983 how to guide, and it's one of the strangest artefacts British publishing produced that decade. The book was published by Pelham...
As I'm getting older now I've finally realized that I can't just keep putting off improving my health. As a teen I was fairly large and in my college years I hit my largest weight. Once I had my first child though and found running I really melted off the weight and hit my lowest weight and held it for many years. It was all in running though. I'm fairly strong and have no problems lifting items and moving things, but I've never been much for going to the gym. Compared to running I find lifting…
Today in history. Battle of Kenapacomaqua - Wikipedia
You asked for it, so here’s an occasional open thread to bitch about anything tangentially
So my main phone was my iPhone 15 Pro, but now it’s (once again) my Moto Razr 2024 in Spritz Orange. It’s still working great, and I prefer some of Android’s unique features. A favorite is how the Files app and device itself work like a PC; it’s easy to move local files (jpeg photos!) between phone (camera) and laptop, no cloud-computing necessary.
In a footnote to the previous post, I said that Python’s math library can calculate the logarithm of extremely large numbers but not the cosine. This post will expand on that comment. In this post I’ll use n = 200! as my example rather than 1000! nbecause this value of N is larger than the largest representable floating point number but small enough to be more convenient to work with. Suppose someone calculates 200! for you: 78865786736479050355236321393218506229513597768717326329474253324435\…
I’ll start by playing a Forest. Sure, it resolves. I’ll tap the Forest to generate green mana and use it to cast Battle Box keyword reference guide. I love Magic the Gathering Battle Box. It’s a great casual pick-and-play format where I can bring it with me to a lunch or an afterwork, shuffle the deck and start playing. No need for everyone to bring their own deck, no long-winded drafting (although drafting cubes is hella fun) and deck construction. No mana drought or mana flood but a perfect…
