2026-10-16Back at the New York Film Festival...Hello!The Korean drama film Possible Love is set to release on October 23 in the US, a month after South Korean theaters held screenings. I didn't see the film myself at the festival that night — I had a train to catch home, and I didn't fancy paying tickets or registering for a full press pass — but the critique online seem good. It seems to be well received.I've already talked about my preparation for the portrait photography frenzy, and my…

[Far too few companies do the right thing, but the number is not zero.] For several decades, long before Apple Stores existed, Tekserve in New York City specialized in repairs for Apple products. Their employee handbook contained a simple but profound instruction: “If you are ever in doubt, do the right thing”.1 I think about it often, and I’ve shared it with the support staff at my Mac software company. Given that, I was beyond delighted by a recent Planet Money episode. It features my pal…

Vicky Johnson-Dahl has dug up her 2016 NACIS presentation on maps in the movies, titled “It’s a Map, Map, Map, Map World,” and resurrected it as a blog post. She assigns movie maps to five… More

Had an absolute horrible night. I woke up 3 times, and 3 three times I had coughing fit that lasted for a bazillion hours. The upside of that was I was able to fall back asleep once things calmed down. Not the best night I have had and it was awfully close to being the worse one.I rolled out of the rack late and felt blah all day long. Not sick blah or tired blah but something entirely new for me. I played with the DeWalt a few times but most of the day I spent molding my butt cheeks to my desk…

With the last leftover pie dough round, I finally got a chance to right some wrongs. After the pair of pecan-less pecan pies I made earlier this week, I’m pleased to report that we got to enjoy this chocolate variation for dessert on Friday night. The recipe was originally published in Cook’s Country, Oct/Nov 2019 but the online version was updated tp be “more foolproof” in a Nov 2020 revision. The filling calls for just 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, which I substituted with 70%…

The amount of AI generated sales emails I get these days is astonishing. If you can't be arsed to write your own sales pitch, why the fuck should I be arsed about your product? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I once asked a specialist in a particularly obscure mathematical subdiscipline how many people in the world could understand her work. “Maybe 20 or 30,” she said. I thought it sounded lonely not to ever be able to explain to your closest friends and family what you did all day. And yet, within that small group math is a highly social discipline full of collaboration, even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it. This is the opposite of OpenAI’s October 6 announcement that it had released a blob…

Today I learnt that our body can grow teeth at wrong places. If humans have a creator*, this creator must be using some Gen AI thingy with plenty of hallucination. * No. ~ Link: First Case of Teeth Growing Out of an Eye Socket – What You Need to Know About ‘Ectopic Teeth’, by Saroash Shahid, The Conversation

I designed a harness built on top of dependent types that uses information-flow policies to prevent attacks involving the lethal trifecta. However, expecting users to write liquid types was unrealistic, and creating a custom SDK for every external interface—filesystems, APIs, internet search and MCP tools—was not practical. Following feedback from Lisbon.ai (thanks, Nuno, Fred, Sérgio and David), I started building Fronteira to make these technical ideas accessible to a wider audience. What is…

Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) Today, October 16th, is Hamilton day! It was on this day 183 years ago, in 1843, that William Rowan Hamilton first wrote down the fundamental result of quaternions. Apparently he was walking from his residence at Dunsink Observatory into Dublin when he had a sudden flash of inspiration, and wrote the result down on the spot, now marked by a plaque: Picture Credit: Brian Dolan This event is commemorated by an annual Hamilton Walk. Broombridge railway…

I am currently traveling, but dutifully set my alarm to order an iPhone Duo. Having multiple devices is the way to go in these situations, so I was at my laptop and had my iPhone. The Apple Store app on my phone loaded first, and that’s when I learned a terrible truth: I could only choose Apple Stores near me for pickup, and uhhh, I am not flying across the country again next week to pick this thing up. I just tried again, out from under the pressure of doing this in the first few minutes of…

PC A mistake I think I can be prone to is allowing perfection to be the enemy of good. Certainly not in my own actions, but in the games I’ll select for coverage on this site. Which feels like a very unfairly pre-damning way to begin my review of the extremely lovely and highly commendable Maple Blade. This short, adorable turn-based action game has you playing as the Purifier, a young girl charged with walking through the spooky woods of the Sage Grounds, a grid-shaped top-down randomized area…

In 2024 I replaced the Logitech MX Master 3 that I had been using since 2021 with a Razer Basilisk V3 Pro and Razer’s Mouse Dock Pro. The Basilisk did what the Logitech never managed to do, namely work without connection stutters, lags and dropouts. It also charged wirelessly on its dock and came with the same free-spinning scroll wheel that I had gotten used to on the MX Master, while being lighter and not covered in rubber that got quite disgusting to touch over time. Since then it has been…

A massive car bomb goes off in front of a hotel in Baghdad, vaporizing the security guard at the front gate. The guard finds himself a soul without a body. An old lady named Elishva has been waiting for her son to return from the war for years and years already. Nobody else thinks he’ll ever return, but Elishva refuses to give up hope. Some even believe that she, or the image of a saint on her wall, has magical powers. Simultaneously, an old, alcoholic junk dealer, Hadi, a neighbor to Elishva,…

I wrote years and years ago about MACISTE IN HELL AKA THE WITCH’S CURSE, a Riccardo Freda join in which a be-oiled he-man in a loincloth unexpectedly shows up in 18th-century Scotland to foil a curse and save an innocent accusee from the bonfire. Interesting how the film is anti-witch-hunting — they’ve got the wrong […]

Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (reigned 610 - 641) was mentioned here when he tried to make the whole empire follow Monothelitism. The idea that Jesus had only a single "energy" and not two (the human and the divine) was not well-received by everyone. That was not the only issue of Heraclius' reign.Born c.575 in (we think) Armenia, his father (Heraclius the Elder) was a general under Emperor Maurice during g the time of Bahram Chobin's revolt against the Iranian emperors Hormizd IV and his son,…

I've been thinking over the summer about the nature of this blog. It's called the Beachburg Sub, named after a Canadian National subdivision that once stretched from central Ottawa into the city's distant northwest hinterland, all the way up to Fitzroy Harbour, into the Pontiac Region in Quebec and beyond. The tracks are all gone past Nepean Junction.You know the story. Canadian National, since taking over the Ottawa Central Railway's operations years ago, has gradually shrunk its footprint in…

Updated October 2026 Modern Comfort Food arrived at exactly the right moment. Nearly seven months into the pandemic, the book felt tailor-made for a time when the world was spiraling and we were all reaching for foods that could offer even a few minutes of comfort. Ina had actually developed the concept before the pandemic, anticipating the stress of the 2020 election, but she could not have known just how much we would all be craving familiar, nostalgic dishes. The book is packed with stellar…

https://petal.live/ https://github.com/kiruna-labs/petal Open source version of CoScreen or the dearly-departed ScreenHero

📷 272/365 - Beautiful morning.

“It’s a beauitful life in the little things, so I stand in the light and I see everything, my, my, oh my…thank you for my life, thank you for it all.” - “Thankful”, Beth HartHello friends! I heard a song (quoted above) that made my heart swell this morning, so I had to include it at the end of this post because it’s how I’m feeling today. It’s been an incredible week! I was almost caught up on photos - and now I have 4000 to go through.Here are the photos for today, with sooooo many more…

While on holiday, I had a chat with the tour bus driver. We were going to some place far and the driver had to take a break. As we were waiting for the passengers to get on the bus, we had a small chat. He is younger than me, single and had been a tour bus driver for nearly 3 years. Through the conversation, I can sense he has a lot of grievance. His struggle, frustrations and pain are real and I feel for him. As I get back to seat, I think about my own issues. Our struggles are different but…

Not all citations are equal. To be an “Author Cited” by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) is to hold some prestige. This post shares the results of a project that captured and counted the Authors Cited works found in the judgments by the SCC from April 2021 to April 2026.

Some 60 years ago this week. The County-class destroyer HMS Glamorgan (D 19) looking very Cold War-ready at her commissioning ceremony, 14 October 1966. Note her giant Type 901 director and triple Seaslug GWS2 launcher. Carrying up to 39 beam-riding SAMs theoretically capable of hitting targets at 50,000 feet, Seaslug proved ineffective, never successfully hitting an enemy aircraft in combat despite plenty of opportunities. However, that did not stop Glamorgan from galloping to history in the…

This is the seventh post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical or practical reason. Beans. The letter G naturally conjures the wider GNU cinematic universe, though I’ll admit I use only a small selection of their tooling thesedays. I’d be tempted to mess with GNUStep, though. My surprising winner for G is Go. It’s oddly the first programming language since Perl (and Java, admittedly) that “clicks” the way my weird brain works. I’ve tried…

The command line should probably have disappeared by now. It comes from an era when computer displays showed little more than text and users were expected to type instructions rather than point at icons. Since then we have had graphical desktops, touchscreens, voice assistants, mobile apps, web applications, and several decades of attempts to make computers easier to use. Yet open a terminal on Linux or macOS, connect to a server, work with development tools, or administer a network device, and…

The future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79) marked a milestone on October 13 (the Navy’s official birthday) by recovering her first aircraft, an F-35C Lightning II assigned to the “Salty Dogs” of Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 23. A U.S. Navy F-35C Lightning II, attached to the “Salty Dogs” of Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 23, makes an arrested landing on the flight deck aboard PCU John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), marking the first time an F-35C lands on a Ford-class aircraft carrier. John…

While companies like Henry and S&W (through Volcanic) produced some of the first lever-action rifles, the Marlin Firearms Company wasn’t far behind. Founded in 1870, the company introduced the Marlin Model 1881, a design by Andrew Burgess, just a decade later. It was then quickly followed by a series of rifles from Lewis “L.L.” Hepburn: the Models 1888, the solid-topped 1889, and the side-ejection 1893. The Marlin 1893, complete with a loading gate, solid top receiver, and side ejection (Photo:…

The Goodies was a British sketch comedy show that ran in the 1980s and 90s, with an accent on absurdist and non-PC humor. At Cult TV Blog, John looks at the episode "Black and White Beauty," which most assuredly falls into both categories.David takes a moment at Comfort TV to remember one of the truly great pioneers of television, Steve Allen. We've always done a lousy job in TV land of remembering our heroes, and David reminds us why we should remember Steverino.Speaking of absurdity, at The…

In the Newsletter this weekElsewhere this week: Solutions for Flensburg - PadborgAnalysis: Wunderline turns to farce, and accountability collapsesBullshit Meter: Croatia - Greece trains on an EU funded coast lineGood week: Battery trains for Niedersachsen, new tracks for BrandenburgAlso a good week: Portugal starts building a broad gauge high speed lineUnexpectedly good week: New high speed line opens in European TürkiyeBad week: More than a Renfe AVE 100 power car in danger of going up in…