I’ve been perennially curious about HoudahSpot, despite how good I’ve found Spotlight to be over the years. The Siri+Spotlight combo has rankled me since it came out; so much of Liquid Glass has made interface elements bigger than I’d like, and Spotlight is no exception. Looking forward to writing up a more fulsome review, but for now, I’ve enjoyed creating some saved searches in HoudahSpot.

I was looking through apps installed on my phone and noticed how apps that do a similar thing tend to have similar icons, which got me wondering whether we’re reinventing hieroglyphics from first principles.

In my inbox, over the years, in no particular order: From: YouTube Premium Subject: YouTube Premium Individual plan price update Email summary: The monthly price is increasing from $13.99 to $15.99. From: 1Password Subject: Important: We’re updating the cost of your subscription Email summary: The annual price is increasing from $35.88 to $47.88. From: GeoGuessr Subject: Upcoming Change to Your GeoGuessr Subscription Email summary: The monthly price is increasing from $4.99 to $6.99. From:…

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, a service by posting extracts of his book on my website.…

With today’s game, due to unique circumstances, I’m going to pull out a review first. Specifically, one from the November/December 1983 issue of Softline. Quoting directly: There are adventures, and there are adventures, and then there are adventures. And after them, there’s this. It’s Blood Quest. It’s new. It’s now. It’s happening. It rages. It melts. It burns. It’s free verse. It’s beyond description. It’s the last word in graphic adventuring. This game has everything, and consequently it’s…

I am someone who enjoys a wide variety of art. Whether it’s music, movies, writing, comics, architecture, podcasts, video games, websites, I love to consume the gift of creation and creativity. Over the last few years I have increasingly found myself conflicted about my enjoyment of art made by certain individuals who years after the creation (and my enjoyment) either put themselves forward for something truly heinous (Zionism) or are pulled up for something truly awful (grooming and preying on…

Tom Preston-Werner's article on README-driven development has aged well in the era of LLMs. AI tools offer powerful automations, but still require quite a bit of steering to produce an acceptable result. Documents like README provide a some guardrails for all contributors of a project, human or otherwise. The first thing I do when bootstrapping a new project is write the following files, in this order: README.md: the project goal, a usage example (especially so if the project is a library),…

If you follow me on social media, you probably know that I occasionally vent about the comically lopsided incentives for authors who publish content on the internet. I normally try to keep these rants off the blog, spare for a short piece back in 2024 — but it’s been bugging me long enough that I should probably state the complaint more coherently.It’s not too insightful to say that online discourse has a strong bias toward ephemeral, low-effort content. Complaints about this are easy to…

Tamlin Magee (last seen here in 2024) has a piece in BBC Future about the Russian cant language called fenya: When would you hide in a raspberry? Why don’t you want to be a sixer? And what does it mean to go to the akademiya? Russian often takes slang to complex levels, such as through Mat, its linguistic system for obscenities. But even a “matershchinnik” (a well-practiced master of swearing) might find the above phrases nonsensical – unless, of course, they are familiar with Fenya, the…

France Statistiques Projections macroéconomiques de la Banque de France - Publication trimestrielle Cette projection partage une prévision à deux ans des indicateurs suivants : croissance du PIB annuel inflation taux de chômage évolution du pouvoir d’achat des ménages croissance de l’investissement des entreprises taux de marge des entreprises non financières Panorama des prêts à l’habitat des ménages de la Banque de France - Statistiques et observations mensuelles Je m’attarde uniquement sur :…

I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order, starting with Carrie. I know there's someone out there already typing a comment to tell me that King published plenty of short fiction before Carrie came out. I'm aware of that. A lot of it was collected later in books like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and I'll read those stories when I get to the collections. The stuff that predates Carrie and has never been collected I'm going to try to track down. Much of it is juvenilia, and…

We went for a wee wander around Seaton Park today, starting at the Wallace Tower, then following the river path along the River Don, crossing the Brig o’ Balgownie then returning back to the park and up past St Machar’s Cathedral. I’ve been wanting to visit the Wallace Tower (also known as Blenholm’s Lodging) for some time as it has a fascinating story. Originally built around 1610 as a Z-plan tower house, it stood proudly for more than 300 years in the city centre on the corner of…

Over at Talk Python, we just launched Talk Python Membership. This is a community of Python developers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts. It’s built around 4 pillars: monthly live tech meetups, a community, bonus episode summaries (coming soon), and no ads for the podcast. Please give it a look over at: talkpython.fm/community We have the first three tech talks already set up. You can see the full details at talkpython.fm/meetups: Talk Python in Production: Building Your Own Infrastructure…

Awekeys currently has a Kickstarter campaign going to fund its new see-through metal keycaps. I’ve signed up. They say they’ve made strides with the diffusers. We’ll see. I tried some one elses see-through metal caps, and couldn’t get them to work well. The best they did was on the dual-LED XVX Trooper63. The legends are illuminated properly when looking nearly straight down on the boared as above, but you can’t see them well from a normal typing position. This is because of inadequate…

Book title: The Will of the Many Author: James Islington Rating: 4.5/5 That last chapter... Why is Islington doing this to me? I wanted to take a break before reading the next book. What a read. Unsurprisingly, it kept reminding me of Red Rising, but it's different enough to stand on its own. The worldbuilding is insane, and the magic system is clever. Or so I think, we've barely seen it in action. And the number of unanswered questions? I need to know what all of this means. So much for taking…

BOUNAN, Michel. Original autograph manuscript for the preface (“Mise en garde”) to the new edition of Incitation à l’autodéfense. n.p. [Paris]: n.p., n.d. [September 2004]. Three loose leaves of white paper; written in blue ink on the rectos only; 21 x 29.7 cm. Heavily corrected with numerous cross-outs, marginal substitutions. Unique; from the author’s working papers. This manuscript represents the complete, raw drafting process for the warning preface added to the 2005 Éditions Allia edition…

Hey there, I am surprised it is October. It doesn’t seem like it should be. In some ways, this year has felt like many years, and in other days, it seems like it was just yesterday that it started. On to the updates! We finally got our plumbing fixed (along with the bill that came with it). Positive side? They didn’t have to tear up the book room, so that’s a plus. Despite the plumbing being fixed, we can’t use the upstairs bathrooms until we replace all the fixtures due to water flow issues.…

Derby: Historic Pubs, Real Ale & a Heritage Beer Festival On Saturday I headed to Derby for a day exploring the pubs with Niall, who runs From Sheffield with Pubs. Starting near the railway station, we worked our way around the city, calling into traditional pubs, Derby’s first micropub and some wonderful historic buildings. We also visited Derby CAMRA’s Heritage Beer Festival at the beautifully restored Market Hall, which was a great addition to the day. Along the way there were plenty of real…

I love finding rare gems that I’ve never seen in all the years of being a Twin Peaks fan. I particularly like production paperwork as it provides insight into what it took to create the wonderful and strange show I adore. One such thing is a Worldvision Enterprises, Inc. press kit for “Year Two” of Mark... The post Twin Peaks Publicity – Twin Peaks Year Two Slide – Heather Graham as Annie Blackburn appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

21780 Coast Highway, Jenner, California 95450, United States

my thoughts are on a loop an image, an idea then remember I wrote about that before you must know already so I stay quiet and wait

My dad learned calculus from this book: Practical mathematics, theory and practice with applications to industrial business and military problems. I wanted to include a photo of the title page from his copy of it in a little biography we’re working on for him, but I ended up with jaggies when using my scaleimage tool. favr.dev’s Java – resize image without losing quality led me to the The Perils of Image.getScaledInstance() Blog (2015, originally on java.net). It says: When upscaling an image……

I have photographed this stunning Sydney building before in monochrome, but here is my effort to capture its architectural luminosity in colour. Walking off a tummy bloated with sushi and Japanese donuts (yes plural), I followed the dockside route. Couples and families and tourists swirled about their weekend quests. Down over there, where the walkway juts out a bit over the water and the view cuts through these tall sculptures to get to the casino, clumps of people were taking selfies and…

I can't speak too much about what happens in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenhiem's insane documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans. There are too many good twists and I do not want to give them away. I'll just say that you should do everything you can to see this movie as quickly as possible, that it strikes me as an instant classic, and that Nathan Fielder (and Oppenheim, of course) is possibly the most compelling documentarian alive. If you can see it in a big theater,…

Sonic Generations was a big deal when it first released in late 2011 for PS3 and Xbox 360. It was the first major Sonic …

I have been running Caverns of Thracia with Fantastic Medieval Campaigns for quite a few sessions1, and just about every session I have to stop and discuss with the players about how to proceed with a ruling. In the spirit of FMC, I have been doing my best to avoid backporting modern D&D-isms into the game. In fact, where reasonable, I do my best to make my interpretations different from later rpgs. So, without further ado, here are a bunch of my rulings for FMC: All HD are rolled every…

I am writing this on my phone. I have been avoiding selling. Following up to people for the ai assistant my friend made for [redacted] and me. I set it up for [redacted]. [redacted] wants one. [redacted] asked me to send them what they needed a month ago. I sent them the list of hardware they needed yesterday. I feel like I might have lost the sale. The hard part for me is the asking for money. My friend built something really helpful. Something a 50-70 year old can text or email or interact…

Rush on tour in 2026? Yes! At almost three and a half hours, this was a tremendous and spectacular show, and pretty special to see a longtime favorite band in a new incarnation.