For your Friday time waster, please enjoy this version of Daft Punk's song "Beyond" (from the album Random Access Memories), with a little help from Michael McDonald's "I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near)." (Youtube link here.)These two songs go together better than peanut butter and chocolate.Also, I want that logo on a tee shirt.

On macOS Tahoe, the Passwords app does put the keyboard focus in the password field on launch. Password field with focus How does Apple mess up something as fundamental as keyboard focus? Are they now vibe-coding macOS? Source: macOS Golden Gate is a buggy mess To be fair, we are still in 27.0.1. However, apart from reverting a terrible UX decision, the raw edges of Golden Gate are showing up more and more.

After six years, I’m finally free of changing diapers!

I went to a funeral yesterday. My sister-in-law’s dad died fairly unexpectedly a week or so ago, and I drove back to Chesterfield to represent my bit of the family. I hadn’t known Les for long, but had of course seen him at all the kind of family gatherings where you tend to overlap with people. I’d sat next to him on the top table at my brother’s wedding (with both of us giving speeches), and met him at Christmas parties and family BBQs. I wasn’t quite a peripheral figure at the funeral, but I…

Niagara River at U.S. side of Niagara Falls, as seen from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada (photo from Wikimedia) 16 October 2026 When we think of the Niagara River most of us think of Niagara Falls without realizing that the river is a whole lot more. In case you missed it, Ryan Sajdak, science teacher in the Buffalo Public Schools since 2017 and New York State Master Teacher Fellow, used NOAA data, USGS lidar and river gauges to create this animation of Niagara River flow from Lake Erie to Lake…

When Wrzlbrnft sent this news story to me, he warned me it was bullshit. Complete and total garbage. All it would take for anyone to realise this would be to 1) look at the topography along that proposed route, and 2) look how few existing railways there are anywhere along there.Yes, the EU wants to better connect the Balkans by rail, but the main infrastructure will be Ljubljana - Zagreb - Beograd - Skopje - Thessaloniki, with branches to the ports on the Adriatic, if anyone can afford to…

Corpus Parisinum 246 (tr. Denis Searby): Nothing is more wretched than a ruler who does not in any way benefit his subjects. Ἄρχοντος µηδὲν τοὺς ἀρχοµένους ὠφελοῦντος οὐδὲν ἀθλιώτερον.

Over time I bought several V2L adapters for my Volvo EX30, hoping one of them would work (even before software version 2.x), but none ever did. When the official V2L adapter became available (part no. 32411386), I ordered it immediately. This post isn’t about the official adapter, though. It’s about its electrical parameters, so you can build one yourself.

From Arashiyama mountain we can see the city in the distance. At left is Mt. Hiei across the city, below is the Oigawa River. Taken from Daihikaku Senkoji temple. 嵐山から、遠くに街並みが見える。左手には、街並みの向こうに比叡山が見え、眼下には大堰川が流れている。大悲閣千光寺から撮影した。

Sadly, I must go outside anyway.

people are failing a curiosity test right now. Armin Ronacher and Ben Vinegar had me on State of Agentic Coding to talk about it, along with DHH coming around, durable agents, a Lisp you program by talking to it, and why the labs cannot afford to fail.Ben Vinegar (co-founder of Modem) and Armin Ronacher (Earendil, and the person most people know from Pi) run a podcast called State of Agentic Coding, and I was the guest for episode 11. Ben and I were in the same room in Toronto. I'd landed the…

If you run transmission-daemon, the somewhat popular (in small circles) Torrent client, any website you visit can talk to it, and execute arbitrary scripts/programs on your system. Oops! The GTK and Qt GUI apps share the same bug, but they don’t enable the functionality that is required to hit this bug (by default, at least). I think attacking Torrent clients (and servers!) is really interesting. You see, if I were a hired hacker/gun for Epstein for the Anti-Piracy industry, I’d be exploiting…

It’s election time! I know this because every day our mail carrier staggers up the front walk carrying a fresh new load of these:These are political mailers. We have already received enough of them to cover the state of Connecticut to a depth of three feet, but they keep coming. They seem to be getting larger.We don’t mind. We voters need campaign mailers, because they tell us which candidates are good and which ones are evil, these being the only two kinds of candidates currently recognized in…

It's hard to craft a book with so much righteous indignation - let alone make it funny, accessible, and informative. Nevertheless, Dipo Faloyin has succeeded in writing a spectacular takedown of the myths which are often perpetrated about Africa. It starts in the best way possible: [Insert generic African proverb here. Ideally an allegory about a wise monkey and his interaction with a tree, or the relationship between the donkey and the ant that surprisingly speaks to grand gestures of valour.…

Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of FT Alphaville (one of the rare bullshit-free zones in the financial press) and his posts are always worth reading. He also just came out with a big, sweeping modern history of the bond market, which is fortuitous given current events.

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where our host will be Little Tim!Although I don't think he approves of us one bit.Watch out for the Skunk River Monster!The Los Angeles novelist who is forgotten at home, but loved in Italy.From "miracle vine" to invasive species: yes, yet another instance of government and unexpected consequences.A ramming disaster at sea.Europe's "hunger stones."Japan's Roswell.How King John blew it.The hidden history of paper.A mother's death kicks off a weird saga.The real…

World Food Day flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Today is World Food Day The UN have a challenge for people aged 5-19. We might not be, ahem, quite that young, but we can still participate here: Create a poster that shows what “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” means to you. Show us how innovation – big or small, old or new – can help feed the world, protect the planet, and build a better future for everyone. Mine’s at…

The Ladder of Knowledge, by Alexander V Gheorghiu, Aeon What We Can Save In A Time Of Endings, by Kat Hill, Noema On Growing Up Cantonese American in Southern California, by Melissa King, Literary Hub (Excerpt from The Girl Who Became King) 'An Object of Lust': How the Ancient Greek Goddess Aphrodite Became a Controversial Symbol of Love and Sex, by Matthew Wilson, BBC

✏️ Catching up on #inktober, with a bit of backlog due to busy days. This was day 10. Working at the pool while the boys had swimming lessons. #inktober2026

There’s a principle in UX design I find helpful: the fidelity of a design should match the fidelity of thought. When you’re still exploring ideas, a low-resolution wireframe is the right tool. A polished mockup, with illustrations and finished copy comes only once the thinking is that far along. The point is to give feedback at the right level, and to set expectations for what people are actually looking at. One problem I keep seeing with AI in writing workflows is that it breaks this principle…

So. They blocked my static, residential IP address. And before you say "did you check that you're not using a VPN?" Yes. Of course I did!The question is: Why?The answer: Who knows?I only learned this had happened a few days ago because I visited their website via a Kagi search result. Then I was greeted with this screen.Well, that's unfortunate. I use StackExchange every single day when I'm coding. I hadn't visited in a few days because I'd been doing some video editing work for a…

Christmas and candlelight go together like mince pies and an entirely unnecessary second mince pie. And candlelight pictures do a lot of the selling at Christmas. A dark church? Check. Rows of little flames? Check. Musicians in the glow? Check. It’s easy to book on the photo alone. Many of those photos come from one brand. If you’ve searched for candlelit concerts in London, you’ve almost certainly come across Candlelight, a concert series run by the ticketing company Fever in cities around the…

I randomly selected an image to illustrate this post. As soon as I saw this photograph, instantlyI remember making it on Deal Island, Maryland. It's a photograph that I've always liked and when I saw this scene, I knew I had to make a photograph of it. Just as I was composing the photo, the deadrise oyster fishing boat motored by. Lucky, I guess, as it added a nice element to the image. The photo was made in December, 2012. (click to enlarge)Very seldom do I write anything personal in this…

Every holiday season, I get nostalgic for ’90s television. I blame the marketing gurus who programmed all those themed holiday blocks back in the day because they clearly got their hooks into me. Even now, it just doesn’t feel like Halloween unless I spend at least a little time watching old sitcoms from the ’90s. My recaps are pretty simple. I’ll provide a spoiler-free synopsis, talk about how well the episode actually uses Halloween or spooky themes, and then grade it based on two things: the…

The fact that I have to explain what this is would have astonished New Yorkers of the late nineteenth century. The picture is taken in a stairwell – you can see the sloped wainscoting along the stair on the left. And this thing is the base of a gas lamp. It’s missing the enclosure, which would likely have been a small glass cylinder (or something similar) on the far left end/ The thing that looks like a pipe is a pipe, which was filled with coal gas, and the bottom-most projection is the…

The Holy Trinity of Male Hotness pic.twitter.com/P5oihkWlSf— 𝘿𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙙𝙚 (@desirecode_) October 14, 2026 What the list cannot see A clip went around this month: the holy trinity of male hotness is emotional intelligence, physical attractiveness, and money. Hotness is a word for what you can tell from across a room, and two of the three items on this list cannot be seen from across a room. You can see a body. You can see a watch, and infer. You cannot see a bank balance, and you cannot see…

"Eddy Went to Spain" by Kate Jacobs Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song you discovered in an unusual way? Eddy Went to Spain by Kate Jacobs A couple of years before his death, Senator John McCain wrote an admiring obituary for an American communist who fought for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. This sent me down a rabbit hole and one of the things I discovered was this song about the great-uncle of this songwriter, who also…

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about designing a bookish escape room: If you designed a book-themed escape room, what puzzles would be part of it? I have no idea about anything specific, but I’d steer away from using details of specific…

The trend is definitely going towards a smaller Engineering and a bigger AI section. I don’t like that. This week, have a look at John Cutler’s Feature Factory Retrospective and the No Man Is an Island post. If you want a podcast and like engineering, check out “Building resilient systems”. Quote of the Week And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman Leadership TBM 445: The…