I’m enjoying a fall outing with the kids. Selfie a day for a year, day 50: Oct 17, 2026 edition.

rewatching every laika film before wildwood comes out.

Was on a call with Pa and he informed me that I received a $500ish hospital bill mailed to his house for my ER visit TWO years ago. Classic move, American health care system.

It's time for online courses to evolve. Here's my vision for 2027. It's 2026, and not much has changed for online courses and learning management in quite some time. Most of the innovation has come in the form of AI, which is good on some level but more often than not has been used to justify price hikes. I think we can do better. In 2027, I want to see the following: 1. Learner-Centric Course Experience Content delivery is played out. Stale. Completely dated. No one wants to evolve it. They…

Je suis allé au Mans ce weekend pour manifester en soutien du mouvement lycéen. Voilà quelques photos. Mention spéciale pour la pancarte Porco Rosso. Si vous pouvez, sortez, soutenez, manifestez. N'abandonnons pas les plus jeunes générations comme celles avant nous. #france #lemans #movementLyceen #protest #mouvementetudiant #polFR #politique #giletsjaunes #bloquonsTout #leftism #anticapitalism #anticapitalisme #bloqus #17octobre #ghibli #intergenerationalSolidarity #solidarity

On his channel about new and old hi-fi equipment, Techmoan profiles a modern Fosi Audio Neo player (the relevant segment starts at 17:36): Fosi Audio Neo apes the iPod. At first glance, it looks exactly the same – a deck-of-cards-sized device with a wheel, and above it a screen showing either the currently playing track, or a hierarchical, textual menu: But the reviewer quickly discovers that the iPod copycat is a disaster in use, its creators accidentally highlighting two important rules:…

I wasn’t going to blog about the Return To X fad. At least it’s voluntary, unlike the Return To Office fad. What finally inspired me was a blog post by Matt Birchler, Why does this chart just go down? The blog post spotlights this issue: What makes Mastodon a place most people come to and go, "no thanks"? Answering this question is key if you, like me, want Mastodon to thrive. The blog post also presents a chart of Mastodon monthly active users over the past four years. Although I won’t dispute…

Heaviness of Sleep (1938) by John Armstrong. • Suntup Editions are reprinting two stories by Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan and The White People will be presented together in a single volume, with corrected texts printed in letterpress. The book will also feature eight tipped-in lithographs by Flora McLachlan, and an afterword by Henry Wessells. • “While it mines much of the same material found throughout the horror genre, The Shout belongs to a parallel cinematic lineage—more art-house than…

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️ It’s been an eon since I posted! Moving as an older couple — no, I’m not that old — is a bit more difficult than when we were 20, 30, or even 40. I’m in such bad physical condition it doesn’t help. Shame on me for allowing myself to become this way. BREAKING NEWS: As I composing this, Gracie, one of our puppers, needed to go outside. Off to the left I notice a light I’d never noticed before. That’s because it wasn’t a light, it was a transformer…

Check out As in guillotine... for more. The “open to work” banner came down on LinkedIn, my consulting work is back on ice, and my new role is officially official. I’ve joined Simmons-Boardman Publishing as the new publisher for the Railway Educational Bureau, which has provided books, educational materials, and training services for the railroad industry for more than one hundred years. It’s no secret that I’m a systems guy, and one of the most fascinating systems ever devised is the railroad,…

Had a fairly slow start to the week, then a progressively intense ramp-up that I tempered by way of a couple of strategically timed outings and a little time on my own projects. I also spent quite a bit of time playing with the FM-1, although I’m having trouble finding the right kind of inspiration. And all sorts of stuff keeps breaking… I’m Done With Time Machine on Synology Time Machine broke again, mysteriously, on Golden Gate, and for some reason only my MacBook Pro was affected. Completely…

At the end of the year, Codeberg will shut down its old Codeberg Pages server, in favor of the already deployed, git-pages-based alternative.1. For many deployments, migration will be quite straight-forward, requiring little more than using a webhook, as outlined in the migration guide. And this page has already for a few months now been served by the git-pages server, without any problems. There is only one little but for the migration path, which affects pages that so far relied on git lfs…

Having children is immoral. It is better never to have been. But what of the joys of life, however fleeting? Only at the cost of immense suffering. Even before your first breath, sickly wet and ragged, your mother suffered for your pitiful existence. As you were manhandled by strangers, you were both a victim and a cause of suffering. Conscious existence is inflicted upon others. Ripples of pain and degradation echo through reality, each of us a selfish epicenter. If you resist the biological…

Stray are possibly not the only band of a certain vintage to have played Hastings Pier in their 1970s heyday and then returned to play to an enthusiastic crowd at the Carlisle rock pub down the road some fifty years later. But after a very successful gig last Autumn (which, sadly I missed because I was at the White Rock down the road for Dave Hill and Slade), the irrepressible Del Bromham and his band are back to rally the troops for another Hastings gig. Following an impressive solo…

Shot this with the new OM PEN which arrived the other day. SOOC jpeg. Pretty sweet little rig. It's basically an E-M1 MK3 in a rangefinder format, which is often leveled as a criticism. It does have some new features, mainly a subset of subject detection autofocus that had previously only been available on the E-M1X and the OM-1 and OM-3 cameras. It's lighter and more discreet than the OM-3, which often sports large lenses like the 12-100mm/f4. I put the little Lumix 14mm/f2.5 pancake on the…

I decided to watch The Lair of the White Worm in preparation for watching the new release of Ken Russell’s The Devils this weekend. I know that movie only by reputation, and am not that familiar with Russell’s other movies. I had no patience for Tommy, and I might have seen Crimes of Passion, but have no memory of it if I did. The only ones that I’m sure I’ve seen before are Altered States and Women in Love, and I only watched each of them once, years ago.1 To be completely honest: I’ve always…

How you picture AI decides what you ask of it. If you see it as a tool, you pick it up for a specific problem and put it down again: you hand it one-off tasks, one at a time. If you see it as a colleague who uses the tools, you hand it whole processes: preparing the weekly summary, going through the inbox every morning, turning a set of notes into a document. That shift forces you to do what you would do with a new person on the team. You give them a manual on the first day: who you are, how…

Piccadilly Gardens Market Street St Anne's Square St Anne's Square Victoria Tap New Cathedral Street Oldham Street Market Street

When I write this, why do I write the word I am writing?

As every responsible Internet user, I use two-factor authentication (2FA) for my important accounts. For a long time, I depended on Google's Authenticator app, but because early versions of the app weren't backed up to the cloud (not a problem anymore) and because as a Google Android dogfooder I switch devices frequently, I turned to Twilio's Authy, which at the time already supported cloud backup and cross device synchronization. Authy has both iOS and Android apps, and also offered a desktop…

Most of my week went into work as you’ll read below. It has also rained for most of the week which is making me a bit cranky even if I do welcome the slightly cooler weather. I had a rather surprising interaction over email when the author of MacMD Viewer reached out to offer a free licence after reading about my Obsidian to week notes setup. I accepted, but admittedly have not had much opportunity to test the tool yet. With Obsidian also gaining support for standalone Markdown files and macOS…

For the first time in my career we completed a design system migration. The new math on big rewrites tickles my soul. As I like to say: at scale you are always mid-migration, mid-rewrite, mid-wowthiscodeisbad. Your company changes every few months and the systems you built 2 years ago are no longer fit for purpose. How you handle these migrations is everything. Continue reading →

As readers of this blog have no doubt noticed, I have recently turned over the majority of content on this blog to guest posts from other authors, either within the mathematics community or adjacent to it. In this post I record some content coming from my own talks and interviews in this time period. “The world’s greatest mathematician explains 6 essential concepts of math“, an interview for Big Think, August 28, 2026. “The integrated explicit analytic number theory network“, a talk I gave at…

Just walked past Gruga Halle. Hundreds of people are waiting to go inside where apparently some TikTok and YouTube stars will fight each other in a boxing ring? I am happy to report that I don’t know a single one of these “stars”.

I’m a Principal Engineer, and I run a junk removal and scrap metal business, Go Green Scrap Pros, on the side. Every lead comes in through a Google Voice number tied to the website. After a year of real volume, I wanted to sell overflow leads to another local business, but “trust me, I get a lot of calls” isn’t a pitch. I needed real numbers. So I pulled a Google Takeout export covering 12 months of that number’s history and built a pipeline to turn 2,200+ raw files into a report. The first…

...will not appear this weekend, as I'm on the TCM Classic Cruise.For anyone who missed it, be sure to check out my post on the cruise's guests and schedule.The column will return next Saturday, October 24th.For the most recent classic film links, please visit my October 3rd column.

Being as I wrote about cooking the garden yesterday and then James made a food questions challenge I thought I would give it a go. What was your favourite food growing up We used to have these packet-mix veggie burgers that were so good. They stopped making them at least twenty years ago and my whole family are still so sad about it. What is your favourite food that is made locally (In your region/country.) My area is well known for its Indian food, specifically Gujarati, Rajasthani, and…

David Bowie A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982)Get It At DiscogsThe third installment in a comprehensive deluxe reissue series of David Bowie's entire catalog, A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) chronicles perhaps the most artistically ambitious phase in Bowie's career -- one that began with 1977's Low and concluded with 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Only two other studio albums arrived in this period -- Heroes, which also came out in 1977, and 1979's Lodger -- which means…

Gina Trapani Once upon a time, the web was mostly a text-based medium. If you were an introverted writer who wanted to share your ideas with the world, it was the perfect place to thrive. That time is no longer. This is part of the reason Chris & I have launched our new podcast Make Great Software (with video!). It’s a discussion show about the timeless, practical principles behind making software that works for people. One principle per episode, each anchored by a story. Plus lots of joy.…