I am rather late to catch up with the enthusiasm for this excellent fantasy police procedural novel set in an alternate present, but here I am, puffing away at the back of the pack. If you like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series there’s a good chance you’ll like this, but I think that will … Continue reading Pagans, by James Alastair Henry →

Read the full post at - Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicholson I picked up Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson on a lark at the library. It was during the PR hype for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and it looked like a solid book. It was a fine read. A little too fast in places – there were parts I skimmed. But here’s my real issue: the whole premise could have been a blog post. Probably a tweet. The argument is that Homer matters because the Iliad and the Odyssey are the oldest surviving…

Link: Design Your One-on-Ones, by Corey Ford at Point CI like this approach to 1:1s. Although some very high-profile founders have said that they don’t do or even like them, I think it’s a vital way to maintain a relationship with your team, make sure they’re well-served, and keep things running smoothly. But it’s also very easy to get caught into a reactive pattern — or, worse, just turn them into tactical status reports.The trick, like all meetings, is to take the time to design them and have…

Journal Mostly a rest day today. After posting last night I was overcome with brain fog, which hopefully explains any dullness in my prose and the fact that I didn’t correct typos til this afternoon. Visibility has a cost. Wally was off his food today, hiding in the corners of the run like a sad little sack. As I’ve said many times before, we know not to panic at a change in behaviour but to monitor and be ready for an intervention if it continues. So we carried him out to the garden to force…

I recently bought a couple of bare root Stinking Iris (Iris foetidissima). They were good healthy clumps of thick rhizomes. Very suitable for dividing so two became nine. And the eight pounds I paid for the pair became less than a pound per pot!

Yes, a party about surfing the internet. I’m serious. I recently hosted an in-person 'Internet Search Party’ (and single release) here in Boston. The purpose and position of the party was exactly what it sounds like — we literally surfed the web. “…But why?”, you ask yourself. Read on for more. What the f**k is an Internet Search Party?! Somewhere deep in the underbelly of the creative web lays a community of glamorous technocrats, curious coders, and eclectic digital artisans manifesting memes…

Joint pain is back, it was a good run. It’s manageable for now, I’m happy with a “peppercorn” CVS-branded foldable cane by Michael Graves Design for situations like this. I predict the pain will subside by about this time next week. Stay tuned for more. BB sat in the pillow corner this morning for a while in his PJs watching the sunrise.

I have come to the realization that I could keep going with life as it is right now and be just fine. I have a decent job, I get to save a lot living with my parents. I get to play games and read and have most basic needs fulfilled… Most days I wake up, pray, shower, walk to the bus, play/read/listen/watch during my commute, get to work, work, have brunch, work, have lunch, work, go back home, play/read/listen during my commute, get off the bus, buy a snack, walk home, get on my computer,…

I’m a huge iOS Shortcuts wiz but recently I feel like Apple is making the shortcut-building experience worse and worse, especially when you’re building long Shortcuts. Because of that, last Friday I decided to convert one of my yet unpublished, but highly-useful Shortcuts, called “Keynoter” into an iOS app. I knew exactly what I wanted so I turned into a director who’s managing “Klaus” (my nickname for Claude Code Opus 5.5), who’s doing the actual programming. Suffice to say, the experiment was…

Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought a month of the ChatGPT Pro 100 plan. Conversion into CAD makes it even pricier, but I’ve been realizing lately that for a very focused user, the value you can get out of it is much, much higher. Almost absurdly so. I worked for a time as a product manager on a blockchain safety-related project that lasted a few years. We had an engineering team in the EU that I met with a couple of times a week, and while they did a good job, the experience working with…

Indie is not a genre.Nor is indie synonymous with “low budget”, “self published” or “small team”. Each of these definitions have counter examples–I encourage you to come up with your own before expanding the spoilers.SpoilersIf Rockstar developed Balatro, it wouldn’t be an indie game.Amensia: The Dark Descent and Luck Be A Landlord evoke wholly different experiences, despite both being indie games.Journey is an indie game despite having a publisher.Cyberpunk 2077 is not an indie game despite…

It’s hard not to appreciate Writer/director Mike Flanagan’s devout commitment to the horror genre. He appears game to tackle anything, has a zillion counterintuitive concepts up his sleeve and is even known to occasionally spin semi-gold from stinky straw (looking at you OUIJA: ORGIN OF EVIL). He’s wowed me on many occasions but he also has a tendency to gild the lily and mangle classic tales to the point that they lose part of their identity. I wasn’t crazy about the liberties he took with the…

In this edition Survey shows rural frustralian with missing connectivity Aussie MVNO brand Boost plans 2026 launch EonFibre plans new data centre service Reseller delays focus for ComCom number porting update Feds survey reports gaps in rural service, including for 111 callsMobile coverage on farms has deteriorated since the 3G network closed in March 2026, according to a Federated Farmers survey.Half of the farms surveyed have coverage on less than half of their property. Nearly two in three…

arXiv imposes a new limit of two submissions per submitter per month (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Book of Shapes: A collection of minimal, generative and customizable SVG-patterns (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers, according to Nature (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). The \(13\times 13\) zebra graph is untraceable (\(\mathbb{M}\)). A zebra is a fairy chess piece that jumps like a longer knight, two steps in one direction and three in another. Almost a proof without…

What comes to my mind when I hear “malleable software”: BTS of Circe in the Odyssey (2026)

Newport Street Victoria Square Howell Croft South Newport Arcade Newport Street II

When I got to the end of this film and saw Terrence Malick’s name pop up with a director’s credit, I was so surprised I said “Terrence Malick directed this???” out loud. (Roommate Russ was in the kitchen and just gave me a long stare before saying “Uh….yes?”) I’ve already got a soft spot for Malick, but it was based on some of his later films like The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, both of which I watched for non-Malick reasons (one was a Best Picture nominee one year, one has John Cusack…

At around seventy thousand feet, a U-2 pilot flies with a handful of knots between the speed below which the wing stops working and the speed above which the wing stops obeying. Both walls are made of air. Both are fatal. The men who flew it named the place where those walls converge the coffin corner, which tells you roughly everything about how test pilots handle branding. Scaling companies live there too, and unlike the pilots, most of them do not know the number. The physics, briefly and…

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #127, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed. You can reach out to me by replying to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon. Week in bed,Felt great to step out.Strong wind blows. There is still a niggle in my throat.…

I grew up with A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, read the stories to my own child, and saw the original drawings on display at The New York Public Library some twenty-odd years ago. The subtle wit and cleverness of Milne’s storytelling helped shape my understanding of comedy and made me love books. I hated the Disney Pooh films because that wasn’t Pooh’s voice as I heard it in my head. The poetry collections (When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six) are also wonderful. Happy Centennial,…

After yesterday’s post about the pear crop there must have been more wind in the night and I went out to find that the baby pear tree (Red Williams I think) had lost a branch, laden with majestic pears. Poor baby tree. It will recover though. In the mean time I have a little glut of gigantic unripe pears to contend with. Recipe ideas incoming.

I am fallible and see no reason to hide my minor flaws if they are part of my personality — no more than I feel the need to wear a wig when I have my picture taken or borrow someone else’s nose when I show my face. Almost all the book editors who read the draft recommended changes at the sentence level, to make my style better, and in the structure of the text, in the organization of chapters. I ignored almost all of them and found out that none of the readers thought them necessary. As a…

Dream Workby Mary OliverGenres: Poetry Pages: 96 Rating: Synopsis: Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems originally published in 1986, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness, so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive, continues in Dream Work. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the…

You can clear the backlog of your open-source projects with AI now. It’s really great at reproducing bugs, implementing reasonable features, adding the tests you never had time to write, and responding to user issues that have been open forever. Copilot and I worked through a dozen projects in the Mongoid organization on two 4-hour bus rides to visit my son in college (go Lions!). I picked the work, questioned the implementations, reviewed the results, and merged changes. The agent did all the…

I have been reading up on the auto industry since I was a young tween, going back to at least 1981 for my first-ever issue of Car & Driver. While I had forgotten the cars reviewed in that issue, I remember it being the magazine's debut of longtime auto journalists Jean Jennings (née Lindamood) and the unforgettable Csaba Csere. This was back when LJK Setright, a man whose life seems too preposterous to be real, wrote the back page articles for C&D. There's something to be said for being able to…

Some things are easier to change than others, that’s for sure. It’s easy to change the channel on TV or to change underwear. But when it comes to decisions in life, changes are much harder. We need more time and more energy to talk ourselves into change. At least I am like that. It takes me so much time to change something. Even buying something can take me weeks of thinking and ruminating. But on the other hand, when I make this kind of decision, everything else just goes smoothly. It feels…

I've been procrastinating one of my autumn jobs which is doing a houseplant audit. I thought also making it a blog post might help motivate me. There's no app or anything. I just have my own notes. An accurate list of who's alive and who's died. I also like to take progress pictures. I'm bad at remembering to note when I potted on or propagated. Ideally I'd log in spring and autumn but I think I didn't even do last autumn so there's some catching up to do. I like this little area. In the end,…

I think there’s no reason not to use Pagecord as your blogging platform. It’s simple yet flexible, fast, and looks great. And Olly, the developer, is incredibly friendly and helpful, and actively working to make Pagecord even better.

Bun v1.4.3 just came out, and it includes a new native bun check command that can replace TypeScript's tsc command to validate that your TypeScript compiles to JavaScript. I tested it on a side project. Yes, it's 2.6x faster. And 12x faster than tsc v6.

From “Black Women are the mules of the Earth” to Thriving and Refreshed (Video and commentary)“In this empowering video, we challenge the narrative that has long portrayed Black women as the "mules of the Earth.” We explore the rich, vibrant lives of Black women who are thriving, not just surviving. Join us as we share inspiring stories, celebrate resilience, and discuss the importance of self-love, community support, and unapologetic joy. Together, we can shift the dialogue and uplift each…