Taken on 26th of September, 2026 Tianjin, Yangliuqing Ancient Town 天津，杨柳青古镇

I’m back from the Assynt and Coigach area of the far northwest of the Scottish Highlands. An area I’ve dreamed of exploring for over decade. And words alone cannot describe the scenes, sights, and senses I experienced.

Last week, two mornings in a row as the sun came up I saw neighboring houses with white roofs, a sure sign of frost. The weather news said it was a killing frost that meant the end of the growing season. Later that morning I was stacking more wood for my daughter and saw that most of her vegetable and flower gardens were finished. The flower in the above photo spoke for them all but I’m not sure what it was. Then just a few feet away the cosmos twins hadn’t been touched. A zinnia had seen…

Walk Score provides address-level walkability scores, neighborhood maps, transit reports, and bike scores for virtually every city, town, and neighborhood in the U.S. and Canada. Integrated into real estate platforms such as Redfin, it is well-known and widely used across North American real estate markets. Unfortunately, its coverage outside North America is patchy.This is why Raian Pollock decided to create Walkably. Walkably maps walkability across 31 European countries, giving every street…

One thing I have learned over my career is that nothing is new and for this post that's technically correct, but equally, it's not often that I end up doing a double take with a piece of design. My second post from my summer trip to Vienna.My first post from Vienna looked at the city's first cycle street.For this post, I was on Taborstraße to the north of the city in the area between the River Danube and the Danube Canal where I was off to find a breakfast pastry in a local super market with my…

After reading the book ‘The Art of Street Photography’ (see here), and soaking in the gorgeous colour work of Joshua K. Jackson, I have been inspired to shoot in non-monochrome for a while at least. Frustratingly, whilst taking these photos I kept tangling with security guards insisting that I could not photograph in the building without a permit, because I was using a “professional level camera”. Meanwhile people all about me were taking selfies and video on their smarphones. This is fair…

Woke up today thinking of Ernie Kovacs, who ranks, along with a few silent movie greats, atop my list of favorite comedians.Am especially thinking of Kovacs' very catchy ditty Hot Cakes And Sausage.This great tune prompted the thought that today's post would be all about breakfast food. After all, wrote a pancake-packed post on National Flapjack Day last March!Hot Cakes And Sausage was Ernie Kovacs' song; he even used it as an intro to his way-out kiddie show spoof The Kapusta Kids In Outer…

Building Snapkin means running a lot of experiments. Which AI model reads a plate best, what a prompt change does to the accuracy, how long you wait for an answer, what each call costs, …

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got light Czech beer, 19th century ale and Zoigl. First, a bit of news about the revival of an old brewing brand: Allsopp’s IPA is a cask ale apparently ‘inspired’ (yes, we know) by an 1822 recipe. There’s something romantic about these old brands – names you know from tin signs in museums and perhaps the occasional stained-glass window in a well-preserved pub. Allsopp’s has the advantage of the…

I have a lot of fondness for the old Universal Studios tour, having first experienced it in the early 70s when Alfred Hitchcock did the TV commercials. I can still hear his distinctive voice saying "Universal Studios too-wa"! Today's trio of photos are from May, 1979, and features the Universal Studios Screen Test Airport (at least that's how it's listed on two websites, though it is awkward if you ask me). It was specifically a version of the Screen Test Theatre that used the theme and sets…

Hard Luck (2006)

Today for the #1949Club, I’m sharing some thoughts on a poetry book which was released in that year – “The Edge of Being” by Stephen Spender. I wasn’t able to find a huge amount of verse issued in 1949, and was reminded of Theodor Adorno’s statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. It’s definitely worth remembering how damaged the world was after WW2; I could see a lot of that in Beverley Nichols’ book which I reviewed on Thursday. Nevertheless, Spender published this book in 1949…

This year's Stirling Prize for architecture has just been awarded to a project in London, way down south in Coulsdon off Lion Green Road. Previously the site was a large car park, but housing needs are tight so they've shrunk that to a really small car park and replaced the rest with mixed housing. It's understatedly impressive. [RIBA video] This is a well connected site, close to the shops and the station, but also a challenging site being on a noticeable slope. The original plan was to…

There’s a particular kind of December panic that ends with you in a shop at closing time, holding a scented candle and wondering whether “they like candles” counts as knowing someone. Here’s the alternative: make the present yourself, with someone who actually knows what they’re doing standing next to you. The workshop supplies the materials, the kit and the patience. You supply the idea of who it’s for. And you get an afternoon out of it, which is more than the shop at closing time ever gave…

It's still slow but now it works much better, both CH32V003 and CH32V006.Link to the RP2040 binary : GithubNote that the CH32V006 is much faster by default, hence making the experience better.Sample vscode launch.json "version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { // Builds the firmware (preLaunchTask), loads it and stops at main. "name": "Debug (Swindle / SDI)", "type": "gdb", "request": "launch", "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}", "target":…

Yesterday I added an MCP server to Eagle, my website’s Go backend. Now I can manage the logs on my website much more easily: I can just snap a picture of a cinema ticket and ask Claude to add it to my website. Logging Film From Ticket The main driver was me wanting to try out how MCP servers worked and get some hands-on experience with AI agents and how they interact with APIs. My usual problem with these sorts of challenges is finding something that is actually useful. I like learning while…

I’m down in Uckfield this weekend for the exhibition and will be enjoying sharing Coalbridge Street with you all…Yet I don’t like hotel stays on my own - so on the road I like to take some trains with me… set up last night with a beverage was my N scale GWR branch line!I build ‘serious’ models but I love the simplicity and honesty of this little train. My first electric locomotive was a Pannier tank, this little N gauge re-incarnation rolls round the Kato circle with a mix of new - and old…

How much can I leave out before an image loses its life? Photographs from Lake Neusiedl lead from ordinary wooden supports towards almost calligraphic forms. A personal experiment in framing, repetition and empty space—and in knowing when to take a step back. The post On the Borders of Minimalism appeared first on Friedrich Zettl Fine Arts.

X is bad. Obviously. Davey hits the nail on the head here: People return to X just want followers in the strictest sense of the word. Sycophants that will just click like and subscribe on their posts without calling them out on anything. Much like the companies they cover, they just want to see number go up. Couple of interesting game projects. The first, PS2 games in the browser with WebAssembly. Secondly, someone ported a bunch of N64 games to Miyoo Mini and a there was asecond project just…

Source Back in the 80’s when Booth and Wade brought them to the worlds’ attention again, Booth predicted it would be commercialized. It seems he was right. One of the worlds great gamefish. Booth and Wade’s book on them is still one of the best fishing reads. Prior post Tons more on his site. This showcases a nice alive one. A great fish.

Now there are days when you wake up and know that a spot of fishing is exactly what you need, and then there are days when your body is telling you to stay in bed, drink something warm and stop behaving like a complete idiot. Unfortunately, when there's a river involved, I have a remarkable ability to ignore the latter, so despite having a cold and a trip to Glasgow looming the following morning, I decided that a bit of sunshine and fresh air would do me the world of good.After all, what could…

If you have tasted the OMG Cinnabon Clusters and fallen in love with them like I did this is a quick, easy and tasty copycat recipe that you can make right in the comfort of your own home. Clusters of cinnamon flavoured white chocolate, Golden Grahams cereal, Heath Bits and toasted pecans, put together in the easiest and most delicious way.Prepare to fall in love. A number of weeks ago my sister and I went on a trip up to Cambridge to the Convenience store there. They carry a lot of Costco…

Katie, We Hardly Knew Ye Most readers will have heard the news by now, but newly minted White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is now former White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia, as she was cashiered by Donald Trump yesterday. Click here for full story

There are some things I do on a regular basis, and of course I try to automate as much as possible so that I don’t need to remember them. One of these things is a weekly review. A part of my weekly review is checking how much time I’d spent on various things during the past week.

It would be nice if this door would just stay open. I start this session by returning to the Upper Catacombs, which I don't think I fully explored last time. Following the rightmost wall pattern, I first come to a door to the Lower Catacombs. It's locked, but it opens with my Key of the Scion, which being a staff instead of an actual key, doesn't go on the same key ring that I can use for every other key. The Lower Catacombs that I enter do not seem to be the same place I visited before (by…

This year’s #LightUpPopUptober project was an adventure! The prompt for my day, the 17th, was “conceal.”I generally don’t cut things as close to deadlines as I did on this one. This has probably been the most #OverwhelmedOctober to date. I got everything worked out in time, and while I can see places that could use a little more polish, I think this is solid.This got a little hectic building the final piece. I think I have everything for a making-of video, though. That will likely be…

Wow, what a week. There was a gigantic pile of to-dos from both regular work and freelance, which I knew would be a lot. I was ready to knock them all out, but suddenly coming down with a bug/virus/something threw a wrench in things. Weirdly enough, despite feeling like garbage, I forced myself to the gym on Tuesday because I really feel happy when I go. At first, I thought I was going to drop weights from how messed up I felt, but I got into a groove after a few sets and exercises. By the end…

A short video this week, but what a machine!

Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I’m putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don’t quite fit!This week I learned that there’s a flying saucer for sale in California (where else?). It’s a Futuro house, designed in 1968 by the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen as a ski cabin you could drop onto a mountainside and heat in a hurry. They sold for $14,000 until the 1970s oil crisis made plastic too expensive to build with,…