There are many among us who aren't nearly as clever, smart, driven (hence accomplished) as the best of us. I long ago recognized that I was in the camp of the former. Long ago. ::chuckle:: As such, I've largely worked and existed within my limitations, to the best of how I'm capable. And even with that, haven't accomplished things in the usual ways that signify success in one's endeavors, in the arc of one's given lifespan. This has not troubled me greatly — though perhaps that might indeed be…

She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett…

No—megalodon is extinct. Can you imagine swimming in the ocean if they were still lurking around? Terrifying!The fossil evidence places its disappearance around 3.6 million years ago. There is no credible scientific evidence that it survives in today’s oceans. Part of me is sad for that, but as I sometimes venture below the waves to scuba dive, I am really, really grateful!But the real

For the longest time, graphics devices in R have been a mystery to me. Yes, I know a lot about how to create graphics in R: I can create some rather lovely data visualisations with ggplot2, I can write grid code directly, and I can use base R graphics when I need to. But this code operates at a level of abstraction one step above the creation of the image itself: in all cases, what these tools do is send instructions to an R graphics device. This device is the thing responsible for taking the R…

2026-10-17Hello! The leaves, they be falling.I noticed someone walking left to right, and I lifted the camera to my eye to capture them as they passed between the two trees. This made for a nice framing in the center of the image.After the busy photo festival in New York City, I took the train to the north end of Central Park. I wanted to walk down the entirety of the park's long end, with enough time to make my train home. It took me about two hours, and it was a lovely stroll as the sun set…

After a busy week last week with lots of library books and lots of reading, this week’s been a bit quieter! Books acquired this week This month’s British Library Crime Classic was their Christmas release, which is how they usually do things, and that dropped onto my doormat this week: That’s it, after the recent excesses, hahaha. I haven’t been back to the library this week, since I haven’t done a lot of reading in that time. Posts from this week Time for the usual roundup! Reviews first, and…

The RSS Universe — Readers, Tools & Standards A living directory of RSS readers, feed generators, monitoring tools, directories, and standards. Every link verified live. [ 2 Spoopy 4 You and Alan is @cogdog 🇨🇦 ] Deskworlds: Interactive, living desktop wallpapers (macOS) Deskworlds puts a small living 3D world on your Mac desktop. The creatures in each world react to your cursor, and you can feed them from the menu bar. Everything runs locally with Three.js and WebGL2, with no account, analytics…

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement. Driving my Droschky (10.09.13) In 2006 Stuart Pessok, Managing Editor of the trade’s biggest-selling newspaper Taxi ran a series entitled ‘We Speak Your Language’ in which he invited readers to submit examples of cab slang in an…

Death by Upholstery - by JA Westenberg Curtain Fever (n.): Lavishing care on the décor of a life while the life goes unattended. “She spent three weeks on the logo for a company she hasn’t started. Total curtain fever.” ✍️ Reply by email

The best Canadian goose recipe I know that can make hunters think twice about leaving their birds for the cayotes. Smoky, slightly spicy, and aromatic from a crunchy crust of pepper and coriander, goose pastrami is one of the best examples of how brining and smoking can tame meat that can otherwise be too gamey... Read More The post Smoked Canada Goose Pastrami appeared first on Forager | Chef .

The rain made the cool winds a little colder this morning. I must have closed my eyes or maybe I failed to pay attention. But either way, the clock is ticking.October is on its way to a quick finish and moving like a bullet about to shoot from the barrel and explode and be gone. November is right around the corner and moving fast. Either way, I know that you and I are one day closer to an answer.And whether the answer pulls us closer together or sets us farther apart, remains to be seen. All I…

It's getting cold in Cornwall and it's nice to remember the blues of the summer. Sparkly seas and tempting swims. You can keep some sunshine on your wall all year round with Cornish blues. This one is a bit of a baby 'Kynance Light' a very popular print which sold out a few years ago. I've revisited the blues and turquoises but made a smaller print. This is my sister in the sea and I did add her to one of the prints especially for her xx So here we go as usual, don't forget to flip your image.…

How employment is changing at Anthropic is a fascinating read.

American beech leaves turning golden yellow, 10 Oct 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) 17 October 2026 Leaves are changing color in Schenley Park. A lot of trees are still green because the oaks change later this month. A view of the wood on Falloon Trail, 10 Oct 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) Yellow is the main color right now: Beech (above) and buckeyes (below). Bottlebrush buckeye leaves turning yellow — veins still green, 14 Oct 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) Red is rare because we have few maples…

I love chats with my father. There are stories, old memories he dusts off and shares, that make me think. Today he told me about a teacher at his high school. It was a prestigious school. Korea’s first “government” school founded by the Royal Court. His Korean teacher was part of an underground movement that fought to keep Korean alive during the Japanese occupation. Unfortunately he was discovered and tortured. They put bamboo shards under his nails but still he didn’t give up his friends. He…

Obnam is going to be an encrypting, de-duplicating, secure, and fast backup software implementation that's easy and convenient to use. I've been developing a new generation of Obnam for a couple of years now. So far I have mostly been exploring architectural and implementation design choices on my own. Obnam is now getting close to actually being able to make and restore backups. In a sense, it's becoming real. Open source software tends to be healthier and more useful to more people for longer…

“The first week in any wet shaving group feels like walking into a conversation halfway through. Somebody posts an SOTD with a three-piece OC and a croap, somebody else asks whether a G5 knot will splay too much for face lathering, and a third person admits their SAD is out of control and announces a 3017. Everyone is being helpful. Almost none of it is in English yet. This almanac is the map. It walks the whole territory in the order you will meet it: the gear, the lather, the shave itself,…

Jesse Schedeen / IGN: In what is easily one of the most exciting comic book-related announcements to come out of NYCC 2026, IGN can exclusively reveal that Paper Girls creators Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang are reuniting for a new project at Image Comics. That series is called ROAM, and it’s their first collaboration in over a decade. I’m a little ashamed to say it took me a week to post about this, because Paper Girls is one of my favorite comics ever (an easy recommend if you’ve never…

Not often do I begin a review with a recommendation for the venue’s catering. In fact never, until now. But the Jazz Café POSK, situated in London’s Polish cultural centre on King Street in Hammersmith, extends a hospitality that includes its restaurant, where before last night’s gig by the Wobbly Rail Five I had a plate of herring with potato salad and a large slice of apple pie with cinnamon — all delicious — and came out with change from 15 quid. In his days as a college radio DJ, Lou Reed…

Tt's quite a striking cover this week, don't you think? Totally black-and-white except for the flesh tones on Hirschfeld's caricature of Jackie Gleason.* Even the famed TV Guide logo has been stripped of its color.*By the way, have you spotted "Nina" yet?It's no surprise that Richard Gehman would take a snarky approach to this article on Gleason, the first of a three-part profile of the star. "One can gauge the depth of his lonliness by how high Gleason flies," is the psychoanalytic subheading…

It’s been a while since I last discussed my devices: the last deep dive was back in 2019, and a lot has changed since. So, it is time for a refresh, and to show how I compute, for computer nerds like me. The switch to linux # I am a big fan of the Apple ecosystem and hardware. However, macOS has become more and more hostile to developers over the years, such as Gatekeeper, notarization, and the growing number of hoops to run your own software (Apple’s own documentation and the notarization…

Imprint’s average engineer is merging 4x more PRs than 2 years ago. Yay. Aggregated behind the average is something even more interesting: we have two teams that are merging 10x their PRs over that period. One engineer is merging 25x the PRs per week of our average engineer two years ago, and a number are merging 10x. That’s pretty neat, and the slope of the line suggests our average in a year is going to look much closer to today’s p90 than today’s p50. Even more importantly, we aren’t just…

First, stats that were passed around on social media last month indicate most people don’t use these settings (we’re talking less than 1%. I find this number hard to believe, but let’s pretend it’s accurate for the sake of this conversation). Second, if they have made a choice on this, they’re likely to have made it at the operating system level, and web developers have access to this choice via media queries should they need them. So the user already picked if they want light or dark. What…

When you set up Claude Code, Anthropic will cheerfully tell you that you can install Claude for GitHub. And you say, why not? I’d like to have my code reviewed automatically by a super-intelligent AI developer. That’s when the monkey’s paw curls. The average Claude output is long, verbose, and often resembles a sloppy word salad. I reviewed a handful of our team’s recent Claude code reviews, and while they don’t look identical, I feel this is a decent representation: Claude finished…

The quick-reference authorization checklist Broken authorization is the number one bug class in APIs, and it has three faces. This is the scannable checklist I run through when I’m testing an API for it — definitions, setup, and copy-paste test steps for each. For the full exploitation depth (every bypass primitive, parser quirks, real CVEs) see the API Security guide; this page is the field checklist that sits next to it. Authorization bugs don’t show up in a scanner because nothing is…

It's not like I'm a style icon now, but looking back, some of the outfits in my younger days were truly crimes against fashion.

FINALLYI tried to get the belt on with the rod but got nowhere. I got a teeny bit of the belt on the big pulley and that was it. The belt would not cooperate at all and after 30 frustrating minutes I removed the rod. I felt like I had given birth when I got the belt partially on both pulleys then.blurry pic matches my moodI couldn't get the belt to fully engage on either pulley. I did manage to get about 3/4 of the belt onto to the bottom pulley and then I stalled. Even though I got 3/4 of the…

What Happened to the Desktop Metaphor? | Dead Parrot BBS The problem appears when abstraction turns into concealment. There is way too much concealment going on. ✍️ Reply by email

Updated October 2026 With Ina’s Breakfast-for-Dinner Board, I officially completed every recipe from her 13th cookbook, Go-To Dinners! While making Boston Cream Pie with Ina will always feel like the official conclusion of my original project, there was no question I would cook my way through this book when it was published later that year. Longtime Ina fans will recognize some familiar territory, including fresh takes on classics like Beatty’s Chocolate Cupcakes, Creamy Hummus, and Chicken…

Today in the drum class, I gave up playing the song I was practicing. I had already spent three days learning it, and still couldn’t play it properly. In particular, I couldn’t keep the right tempo. I realized that I shouldn’t try anymore and decided to give up on it. I am largely an autodidact in many interests of my life. I taught myself programming, reading music, running etc by reading books, watching videos, listening to people. A big part of learning by oneself is knowing when to give up.…