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…
[1995]The guitarist from St✮Johnny Tom Leonard had a solo side project called Luxurious Bags. Their cd Frayed Knots was a toppermost lo-fi psychedelic slacker noise pop jam. There's a gorgeous epic psychedelic anthem hidden beneath the muffled lo-fi layers of hazy sound here.
Kinda missed the memo that I can follow back with the AP plugin nowadays too 🤔 I’ve to test this.
Frankie Avalon in Beach Party (1963) Vitals Frankie Avalon as Frankie, lovestruck surfer Malibu, California, Summer 1963 Film: Beach Party Release Date: August 7, 1963 Director: William Asher Costume Design: Marjorie Corso & Renié WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Four years after Gidget launched the beach party subgenre, the formula was refined with less morals and more midriffs in the simply titled Beach Party. Released 63 years ago today on August 7, 1963, Beach Party was the first of…
I had a blast at Stationery Fest last weekend! I did a lot of different things that I’ll be sharing over the next few weeks, starting off with this shopping adventure with Daisy from Yoseka Stationery. Have a look and see some of my Stationery Fest haul!
Session 324 was played on 3/22/26Morgana, wizard 10 (Rob)Borumar, Triton Thief 11 (Josh)Blotto, Goblin Fighter 8 (Lanse)Nick, Fighter 8 (Me)Koltic, Cleric 9 (Cindy)Aroon, Fighter 8 (NPC)Jameth, Fighter 8 (NPC)Lor’Koth, Dwarf 8 (NPC)Exploring the area around the tombs, but away from the spider queen, the party found some charcoal drawings and then a passage leading up… hundreds of feet up, at about a 35 degree angle. With few places left to look outside the webbed sections, the party headed up……
Last fall I moved this site back to Hugo and resumed work on its theme. I haven’t written much about the theme itself since then, so it feels like a good time for an overview of what’s actually changed under the hood. None of this was one big redesign. It’s been a lot of small releases, sometimes a few in a single day. Each one nudged things forward, but looking back at the changelog, a few themes stand out. A New Coat of Paint The most visible change was a full color refresh back in the…
Yesterday my work was rather entertaining. A workmate went on vacation for today and tomorrow, and there were a few tasks I had to do on their stead. This was nothing unusual, he covers for me plenty as well. However, I do wish things had allowed for at least a bit more time to write a post. I did have a relatively easy idea which was a quick draft before my actual post of the day. So, here’s a list of things I still do as a young adult that most of society expects me to stop doing, or…
Today's episode of "Things I See In My Backyard That I'd Never Want To Eat" was written on location here in Swampsville, Florida. (Aka Orlando.) Nope. Noooooope. Because if you can't polish it... ...slap some wings on it?Still nope, by the way. And finally: Thanks to Igor V., Elizabeth C., Nathan D., & Anony M., who informs me she's got dibs on the tail.[Hurk.]*****P.S. Need to hide your eyes *and* listen to music or a good podcast? Then check THESE babies out: Bluetooth Sleep HeadphonesI…
On the morning of August 7, 1890, a 48 year old woman named Anna Månsdotter was led into the courtyard of Kristianstad district jail in southern Sweden and beheaded with an axe. It wasn't the crime itself that made her famous, plenty of people had killed before her. It was everything that came out during the trial. Swedish papers dubbed her Yngsjömörderskan, the Yngsjö Murderess, and the name stuck. Anna Månsdotter remains the last woman ever executed in Sweden, and the case is still one of...
A quick one to let you know about some upcoming gigs where I'm doing visuals, again with Picodevil.On Monday the 17th (so, like a week and a half away), I'll be doing visuals at AlgoLush. The vibes are: nice and chill, some nice grooves. Headlining is Nū, who is over from Australia! You can get tickets here, minimum cost of £6.And on September 16th (which is a Wednesday), I'll be playing at the 17th birthday of TidalCycles, and also really the birthday of that whole family of uzu languages (of…
Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash Introduction Michael Harley wrote a piece called How I make my blog posts more resilient a couple of days ago. There are a lot of good ideas and principles that he covers for maintaining a blog, or just about any website. Reading his article made me think back to a situation from nearly ten years ago where I went through a fairly major incident with one of my sites. While I documented the issues broadly at the time, I only partly talked about one of the issues…
Off the back of Adam of OMG.LOL fame 1 tooting this the other day and me responding I wanted to just talk a little about how grateful I am to have to experience diverse cultures and different people throughout my life. Especially whilst growing up. I grew up in Oldham. A town in Greater Manchester in the North West of England. You probably haven’t heard of it. If you have it’s probably for its 15 minutes on the world stage during its race related riots in 2001. Oldham is quite culturally…
Tomorrow (Aug. 8) is Open Wire day – a chance for you to ask any and all woodworking questions and get answers from Chris and me, as well as from your fellow woodworkers. The Open Wire post will be live here on the blog at 8 a.m. tomorrow for you to post questions in the comment section, and we will start answering…as soon as we wake up and log on. I’m sure Chris will also be busy working on a chair tomorrow, and I’ll be working on junk removal from my backyard (my ex-kitchen is stacked up…
A Friday Hodgepodge1. From a news story about the "alien chemistry" found within a meteorite, here's what to do if a meteor strikes your home and you want to help scientific progress:He then immediately preserved and documented the entire scene using disposable gloves and aluminum foil to place the meteorite fragments in glass jars.The surviving rock weighed two pounds and was a rare, and especially interesting type.Well done! 2. At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe notes that researchers looking to…
July 2026 First long drive This month’s musings are late publishing as we’ve been away. After yet another operation I’ve driven to Dorset, the furthest I’ve been behind the wheel for months. London Appreciation Society I’ve been contacted by the London Appreciation Society to give a talk next year. Astonishingly I had never heard of them, but they’ve been around since 1932 and the organisation is so popular there is a 5 year waiting list to join. Talks are given on a wide-range of subjects…
Last week, many media reported that in January 2025 a US citizen named Sam Tunick, arriving at the international airport in Atlanta, was stopped for questioning and told to hand over his phone. It appears that he gave the border agent a “duress password” – an unlocking code that wiped the phone when the agent typed it in. This feature is included in his phone’s operating system, GrapheneOS. Now he’s being charged with a felony. At the Guardian, Timothy Pratt reports that without his knowledge,…
I got a bigger and better monitor recently, and I’ve been exploring calibrating it on both my Mac and my Linux desktop for the last week or so. It started out as a necessity: at full resolution (3840 x 2160), the text was just too small for me to read. Since I hated the fact that things looked “off” at a lower resolution, and the options for my new external display on the Mac were painfully minimal, I quickly found out about BetterDisplay. A couple of days later I was already reading about the…
Set up a stack of virtualization tools on a Debian host for creating and managing virtual machines (VMs). Start Here Directories Permissions Services Create VM Resize VM guest window Video Acceleration Virsh and virt-clone Resources Start Here KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is built into the Linux kernel and handles the CPU and memory details. QEMU (Quick EMUlator) emulates the various hardware components of a physical machine. Finally, libvirt provides the tools for creating and managing…
This is a lesson that you are never too big to disappear. I remember the arrival of Google Search (when that was all they did) and how it collapsed Yahoo search from the scene. Googling even became a verb. As big and massive as Google Search was, who can say they still go to the Google search site to search, after ever having asked what they are looking for in most AI services today? Even just a year or two ago, most people would have laughed at you if you told them no-one would be actually…
Something is amiss . . .Or maybe something is off or off-center and me, I am somewhere in the middle.Do you understand?I am stuck and looking around at the world that somehow consumes me.There is too much to see and so much to consider and at the same time; I am reminded when I was told, “keep it simple, stupid!”Overthinking can be amazing.or at least, I think so. I am told the first shall be last and the last shall be first.I know and I get that. But wait –I wonder about this and I wonder out…
I was wondering why hare did not seem to be working anymore. I tracked it down to a missing line in /etc/pam.d/sshd. The file is there in this snapshot: [12:24 r730-01 dvl /jails/serpico/.zfs/snapshot] % diff -ruN autosnap_2026-08-04_00:00:18_daily/etc/pam.d/sshd /jails/serpico/etc/pam.d/sshd --- autosnap_2026-08-04_00:00:18_daily/etc/pam.d/sshd 2023-12-03 16:38:51.359135000 +0000 +++ /jails/serpico/etc/pam.d/sshd 2026-06-12 09:42:15.000000000 +0000 @@ -21,4 +21,3 @@ # password #password…
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. Source: One step at a time Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that almost no one’s in competition. They’re on their path, you’re on yours, and there’s a quiet warmth in the nods you exchange. Source: One step at a time
