46 years into this thing and I’m still learning! Man what a life. A quick reflection: Ran Inevitable at the pub game last night. Offered it as the start of a 3-shot but I think I won’t continue it. In attendance: my cohost’s wife filling in for a no-show, the sister of one of my regulars (who was totally baffled by showing up for the finale of Deathmatch Island last month; I told her to come start a new thing), a couple new guys, brothers I think of one of my regulars. And one guy who, sure…

In the early 90’s, I had the great privilege to be able to spend half a year as an exchange student in wonderful Dublin. Once in a while my friend and I were invited to an Irish family for dinner. We always enjoyed these invitations tremendously. The reason for this were - as you might have already guessed - rather not the really well cooked potatoes we were usually served, but the overwhelming kindness and generosity of our hosts. Of course I knew about „the Troubles“, the Irish conflict. And…

My mastodon server went down last night. What would you do if your mastodon instance went down? What if you couldn't post your thoughts online continuously? Well, I would compulsively write out my thoughts into a text file that I will then file away and never look at again. Gamepad.club started throwing errors as I was writing a series of posts about my DOS2 session. I didn't get to post my last post which was going to be a screenshot. Then I got distracted by the email that let me log into the…

It was my birthday week. I took the day off and didn’t do much. Anju took me to Mai Mai on MG Road. I loved the food. I also liked that we could sit outside. It’s rarely possible in Bangalore these days. It’s become so dusty. We went out for dinner the night before at Bombay Brasserie, Orion Mall. I’m glad the young (Uma) and the old (our parents) liked the food. I had a good time. Anju baked my favorite lemon cake. Yummy! On one of those lanes in Cooke Town I did two P.Ts this week. Anju also…

Since the early days of crime fiction dogs have been a part of the picture, on the page and in the lives of the authors who wrote such works. Some authors had pet dogs such as Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Georgette Heyer. James Norman, in fact, used his dogs as a means of discouraging dinner guests from returning, by having his pets lick everyone’s dishes clean before putting them back on the shelves (one hopes he washed them properly after his, no doubt, horrified guests left).…

Last week I got a bit of a nesting instinct come over me. Pulled up two kilograms of carrots from the garden. Made a carrot soup, a carrot and lentil soup. Then with the rest of the lentils I made dal, half of which I stuffed with spinach also from the garden. Each batch is two meals for two people. I then freeze each meal's worth in tupperware, pop it out the tupperware like an ice cube, and bag it. Alongside this I cooked up some ugly tomatoes into pasta sauce that should be at least another…

I saw Wouter going mad for stickers to put on his laptop and I decided I would do the same! I have had like a couple dozen loose stickers that I got from AliExpress ages ago, some were gifts and some were included in videogames I’ve gotten, so I put a mix of eerything here and well, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out! Behold my glorious creation! My laptop with a bunch of stickers on it, enjoy! The ones I got from AliExpress are the following: The IBM computer, PSP, Game Boy Color, NES…

https://k.sosnierz.me/08-11-24/ Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick

Intro Rarely, but consistently, people using regular expressions meet a scenario where a regular expression becomes incredibly slow. This is called "catastrophic backtracking". There are multiple solutions for this, but the one I am going to be talking today is atomic groups. Definition An atomic group has the syntax: (?>subexpression) . It instructs the regular expression engine that it should greedily match the subexpression and never backtrack. In other words, once it has matched, the engine…

So – as I mentioned elsewhere, this project is based on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die books. And I do mean “books” – there have been multiple editions, and each time we get a new edition, the editors make some updates. Instead of picking one of the editions (there have been a little over 20 since the first one), I decided to include every movie that was included in any version of the book. They were coming out every year or so for a good while – but in 2021 they stopped. ….And…

This is an experiment. At an online Homebrew Website Club on Wednesday talk turned to week notes, the ones we liked, why we liked them, and so on. Some are mostly personal reflections, others are mostly links, and naturally some are a mixture of both. The ones I like tend towards the linky, but when challenged to share some of the links I had myself enjoyed I couldn't. So, an experiment. Each week or thereabouts, a few links I have enjoyed for one reason or another. Here goes, with no promises.…

Always feel a tremendous, enlivening rush when I listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Especially tonight, after the day’s events in New Delhi, with the arrest of Abhijeet Dipke and Neha Bora. The soul needs something to keep going and tonight, it must be ‘Dama Dam Mast Qalandar’. This is him and crew performing at a concert in 1993. My knowledge of music amounts to little but I have always enjoyed watching him sing, lost and found in his qawwali, the frissons of his murki and the full-throated soar…

Global population is expected to keep rising for the next 50-60 years, because it will take awhile for the demographic force of declining birthrates to overcome the life expectancies. In addition, the world still has lots of very poor people: for example, about 800 million people around the world live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $3/day, and of course hundreds of millions more are not far above that line. With a rising world population, and one where we hope the standard of…

Do you manage email for your family? Do you run Home Assistant at home? What happens if you're no longer around to manage it? Will your family be able to cope or will they resent your "smart home"? Documenting all of this makes everyones life just that little bit easier when shit hits the fan. This topic might seem a bit morbid to you but I honestly do feel like it's one worth talking about. Passwords and two-factor authentication The biggest problem has to be passwords and two-factor…

Something really funny about seeing the morning routine post is the amount of people that had a line about feeding their cats, because if you are a cat owner you know they are relentless in their routine and you love it. Paying the cat tax here. I also recently got my hair done (dyed and bleached) and cats always get too overstimulated by the new smells and try to groom my freshly done hair, ha ha ha. Bonus cat (my friend's cat). reply via email: hello@fiddery.com

I have a vague memory from a long time ago. Someone told me that after wars, nature wants to replenish the killed men, and the proportion of boys among babies increases. I recently remembered this claim and looked it up. Yes, the statistical part is real: during and right after both of the World Wars, the proportion of boys increased. This effect even has its own name: the Returning Soldier Effect. Its explanation, however, is still missing in action. By the way, old observations of the sex…

I think we had a discounted membership through work when my wife and I were first married (over two decades ago) but we rarely, if ever used it and let it lapse. But last Saturday we got a Costco membership. The primary reason? Protein powder. When our town finally got a Costco warehouse a few years ago, everyone went nuts. We didn't understand the hype – we already had a Sam's Club, after all. We have never seriously considered a Costco or Sam's Club membership for various reasons. Lack of…

Vratislav died pretty much on schedule in 1094, living 2 years longer than historical Vrat. He was in the middle of conquering Lower Silesia, expanding the Bohemian kingdom eastward as planned. His younger brother, Ota, took the throne. He invaded Anhalt and was promptly granted East Franconia – an unexpected expansion to the west. He drove northward to the Baltic, taking over Nordmark in a holy war. Why a holy war? Because he'd gained claims on each county, but never on the duchy. FFS.…

Do you manage email for your family? Do you run Home Assistant at home? What happens if you're no longer around to manage it? Will your family be able to cope or will they resent your "smart home"? Documenting all of this makes everyones life just that little bit easier when shit hits the fan. This topic might seem a bit morbid to you but I honestly do feel like it's one worth talking about. Passwords and two-factor authentication The biggest problem has to be passwords and two-factor…

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 394-397: BY THE MIDDLE OF 1944, the anticipation of worse things to come on the home front led to a new policy. The government, still under Tojo’s leadership, announced an evacuation program for primary schoolers from thirteen metropolitan cities. The children, ranging in age from eight to twelve, were moved to the countryside, where they lived in large groups; for many, it was the first time away from their parents. They…

The distance between two points is ordinarily a problem for geometry. On Points of Inaccessibility, it becomes a pathology of attention. A chance encounter at MUTEK in Mexico City in 2024 brought Ibero-American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri into conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, whose invitation to the Uncloud residency in Utrecht the following spring led their inquiry into the abandoned carcass of the Pieter Baan Centre. Once a forensic psychiatric prison, the building had…

Enjoying with Matías.

Abstract architectural detail of Downtown Dallas’ One Main Place. The post Squared Off appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

The C Bounded Model Checker https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc is a useful tool on the pareto frontier of soundness and pragmatism. ASMC https://github.com/philzook58/asmc is another attempt to glue lifted Ghidra assembly semantics into it.

A song that you discovered in an unusual way. Ahhhh illegal music, downloading MP3s galore, Napster, Limewire, WinAmp. I had more music than I could ever listen too, most of it still on an old iPod. I download all sorts. Compilations made up by others were a favourite, 20 tracks, all random and it was in one of these that this track appeared. Most of those compilations weren’t great, in either artistic/musical talent, or even decent digital recordings. But this, this sonic treat that I only…

I’m six weeks out from a book deadline, which means all of my brain is going to be dealing with that and I will have no brain cycles left to do much of anything else, including evaluating new fiction to see if I want to blurb it, so: I am on blurb hiatus through the end of 2026 at least. If you send me an email asking me to consider a book for blurbing between now and, oh, let’s say, January 15, 2027, it’s going to be a pass from me. The issue is not the book, it’s my writing deadline and a…

I can still remember buying my first BMX Bandits record, 1993's Kylie's Got A Crush On Us, from Impulse Records in Motherwell. I bought the 7-inch and CD single. I was already aware of the band through my religious reading of both the NME and Melody Maker every week. Also from homemade cassettes that would get passed around. The Bellshill Beat TV show was broadcast the same year, presented by Duglas and featuring the Bandits, Fanclub, Vaselines, Pastels, Superstar and The Soup Dragons. It was…

In fiction face slapping is about getting revenge for past wrongs. There may be some actual physical slapping involved but the revenge is the most important thing. The humiliation of the person or group that once wronged the main character is key. The face slapping trope is tied to Asian culture and is popular in web novels, light novels, mangas, etc. Pick a random web novel from any genre and you’re likely to find someone bullying the main character while they’re still weak and unable to…

The Last Song of Penelope – Claire North Odysseys is back on Ithaca. Things do not go well for the suitors, and thus for Penelope and her maids. And where Christopher Nolan sent Penelope and Odysseys sailing off into the sunset leaving Telemachus to take the reigning reins…. Claire North, and Athena, give us the battle of Laertes’ Farm. A satisfying end to the trilogy. Publisher page: The Last Song of Penelope – Claire North

Opus 6: The Taming of the Shrew