troll flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says What do you think trolls look like? Show us by any of the usual #DS106 ways. Years ago we had a troll. She seemed lovely to everyone else, but she took against our lurker research and followed us around making spiteful comments whenever we posted. Eventually I blocked here, and last I heard she had retired and vanished. Good. Anyway, here she is at the top of this post.

Cars 2 has always been treated as the ugly duckling in the Cars franchise. I'm here to defend it. I think this film is the most logical next step you could have taken without playing it safe. To write the first Cars film, the weird geniuses in Pixar went out to find all the different ways that cars affected our life. The first film is feverishly devoted to vehicles, it's about (fictional) racing history rooted in real racing history. It's about settlements that get bulldozed over in the name of…

Operation Outbreak What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Nothing to Hide Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club reads Operation Outbreak. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. For Clarity : You can best think of these posts like their titles suggest, as the seed of a discussion group (“book club”) to spark conversation about a Free Culture work. Thinking…

A Brown economics professor gave his first-ever take-home midterm this spring. The class average was 96%. His midterms usually average between 65 and 80%, and this exam was harder than his past ones. He ran it through ChatGPT, and the answers mirrored what his students had submitted. The giveaway was the style. On one question, a direct argument was the obvious route. ChatGPT and many of his students used a convoluted proof by contradiction instead. Correct, but oddly contrived. Then he made…

The reddish-brown building in the center is the 1898 Williams Building at the corner of Monroe and Wells Streets in Chicago. It’s ten stories of early steel-frame skyscraper designed by Holabird and Roche. In front of it, left and right are early 1900s buildings; behind it are some late 1900s towers. It’s nice when you can get the different generations together for a photo.

The best in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and a finalist in 2025, these have a big reputation to maintain... The pastry is sweet, and the texture is balanced nicely between crumbly and firm. The filling has some BIG flavours! Very fruity, and there's a massive hit of booze. Perhaps too big as it almost overpowers everything else. 4 out of 5. (Palm oil, but COOP claims its is responsibly sourced)

Primetime 2026, Lance Oppenheim My rating: Decent The movie is pretty capable of entertaining for its duration, but it’s kinda forgettable. There are some incredible shots though, and the acting overall is really good, but the screenplay is clearly the weakest part of the movie.

And…we’re back from the dead, at least as far as these link posts are concerned. V. H. Belvadi’s list of independent type foundries. The 1MB Club on disabling automatic redirects to HTTPS (via Dave Gauer). For sites like mine, I think the argument makes sense. Haven’t done it yet here but I’m planning to. Also planning to set up a Gemini server at some point. Marcin Wichary on the writing and publication process for his Unsung blog. Fascinating. Augmental, a hands-free touchpad/mouthpad. While…

A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game, by Jenny Uglow, published 2010, biography, 645 pages. Quite liked it, which is no surprise because (as I believe I’ve mentioned) 1600s England is my new objet de fascination. There’s Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, John Aubrey taking Charles to see Avebury, the birth of the Royal Society, the East India Company, the plague, the Great Fire, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and more. I also like Uglow’s writing and have started collecting all of the…

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 26.8. Length contraction is the idea that the concept of length changes when an object moves with a speed comparable with the speed of light. It is not about thermal contraction – the decrease in the length of an object when its temperature decreases. In post 26.8 we saw how motion at speeds comparable to the speed of light influences the concept of time: here we will investigate how it influences the concept of length. The two posts could be…

Getting Philips Hue dimmer switches working with Home Assistant ZHA Moving my remaining IKEA and Innr bulbs from Philips Hue to Home Assistant’s Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration was a bit step, but it was only part of the job of consolidating my Zigbee networks. I also needed to migrate the Philips Hue dimmer switches that controlled some of the lights. I have two RWL021 dimmers. One controls six IKEA TRÅDFRI GU10 spotlights in my loft room, while the other controls an Innr bulb in my…

Guess what? In the year of our satan 2026 setting up new phones is still massive amounts of bullshit that steals a whole day of your life. Took me a dozen tries to upload a photo to this post because apparently WordPress doesn’t like photos from brand new iPhone 18 Pro’s? (this is mostly posted to try and figure out the glitch with photo uploads) STATUS: bleh. Off to see the new Godzilla film tonight if I live that longREADING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)LISTENING: FROZEN PASSAGES,…

My purchases for October and November. During the first Friday of every month, Bandcamp waives the their revenue shares so all the money goes directly to the artists. This started during the pandemic to support musicians and labels. I think it's great that they've continued this for six years now! BTW, I didn't know what Bandcamp Friday was until I joined Bear Blog.So if you've blogged about Bandcamp Friday previously, THANK YOU. I'm pretty slow at checking out new music, so I probably would've…

📢 This is the recording of the “Update on Landlock talk” that Mickaël Salaün and me gave at the Linux Security Summit Europe in Prague. It gives an update on Landlock development over the past two years and reflects our current thinking about the direction of the project: 🌍 Talk page | 🎥 Video on YouTube Talk Summary Landlock gained a few interesting features to restrict more operations. We’ll explain unix socket restrictions, signal scoping, thread synchronization support, and UDP control.…

Daily Drawing 1042

John Gruber has written a piece that is quintessential Gruber. You might think it is his review of the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, but it is so much more. Grab a cup of coffee and give it a read. Here are just two of my favorite passages: "Second, the weight reduction Apple was able to achieve with these machines is astonishing. The 14-inch models weigh a full half pound less. The 16-inch models weigh 0.7 pounds less. Almost three-quarters of a pound! I saw numerous attendees…

Architectural detail of the Philip Johnson-designed John F. Kennedy Memorial in Downtown Dallas. The post Shadow and Light appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Two of the best and most remarkable documentaries ever made were released in British cinemas in 1924. Both focused on two very different but equally dangerous and doomed expeditions attempting to make history at two of the deadliest and coldest locations on the planet. The Epic Of Everest captured the attempted British ascent of Mount Everest earlier that same year, while fellow British documentary, The Great White Silence, focused on Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole between 1910…

The Devil’s Elbow by Gladys Mitchell 1951 [Extract from the rulebook supplied to the guide/courier on a coach tour of Scotland] ‘When at the definitely holiday-type grandiose three-star hotels (cf. particularly those at Scotstone and Blaneden) where after-dinner ballroom dancing is the norm, the courier should take the opportunity at tea-time of attaching himself to the largest party, preferably a mixed gathering, and should remark with apparent casualness that he proposes to wear full evening…

LLMs are useful tools. They're also the products of the greatest theft of intellectual labor in human history. Both of these things can be true at the same time.In the right hands, LLMs can produce good, reliable software in shorter timeframes than ever before. Most hands are not the right hands. Most organizations using LLMs to write code are producing slop, no matter what they tell you in their press releases.If you've never built serious software using an LLM, I urge you to make an honest…

2026-11-07 A 14–30B model runs fine on a thin-and-light laptop with no discrete GPU. But when I asked it for shoulder-friendly pushing exercises, both models I tried gave confident advice that fell apart on a second read. A note on how this was made: I ran the models and the tests myself. The setup steps and the analysis of each model's answers came from Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, which walked me through the installation and reviewed the outputs with me. Why I tried it I wanted a model…

...and why you might want to.

The first Weekend Reading every month can be read by anyone on the Monevator website. Subscribe for free to our email newsletter or become a member to ensure you see the rest. What caught my eye this week. Shared references are a tricky business. For example, if I reach for a few French-ish sounding phrases from the classic BBC sitcom ‘Allo, ‘Allo, a younger reader might think I’m having a brain event. Meanwhile, I’m sure older folk who weren’t paying close attention to the music scene in the…

Haaaaappy weekend! It’s been a busy week, though it always seems to be a busy week around here! Books acquired this week Wooo, another pre-order came in! I thought Mistakenly Saving the Villain was supposed to be released in October, but I guess either it got changed or the date I saw before was an error. I’ve been eagerly waiting for it, either way! I’d actually preordered it back in August, knowing I’d want it ASAP on release. I did also snag a handful of novellas that looked tempting in…

Best of the blogs ▷ I didn’t know it’s National Adoption Month until I read this article from toska, who himself is adopted and shared perspectives on his experience that shocked me. Read Reflections on National Adoption Month ▷ You might remember that Radio Shack was “a Tandy company,” as their ads all said. Turns out Tandy was named for founder Charles Tandy, who started in leather goods and for a while owned Pier 1 Imports. David Farquahr profiles the man. Read Charles Tandy, the mastermind…

The water tank sensor died, twice. This is reminiscent of something about Johnny Depp. It looks like water got into the enclosure through the cable glands with heavy rain. Had to take it down, dry it, and add silicon sealant around the glands. TIL: add drip loops in the cables lower than the ingress point, so the water drips down, and it’s best to have the ingress points facing down. I took this opportunity to get PCBs printed for the adapter (and the RT85 CTCSS adapter). First time going all…

I’ve just started our first morning fire in the woodstove. The lines below from Jack Baumgartner struck me at the time and have remained with me since. Downstairs, I start the hot water for coffee, still talking, and waiting, and listening. I stir the coals in the woodstove we heat our home with, remove some ashes and place two mulberry logs on the embers to ignite. This is priestly work and an art near to my heart, maintaining a fire for my family. It is a part of my worship.

Another nasty day. Dull with rain. Stayed in bed until 10.30. Brushed leaves up off the steps. Dot and Jane came. Ron painting. Never went out. Watched the telly.

I was completely wrong about him. By George Monbiot, published on Bluesky, 7th November 2026 People have asked me how I feel about nominating Russell Brand a “hero” in 2014.I feel very bad about it. It must have piled on the pain for his victims. I apologise to them. Though there was nothing published about his crimes at the time, I should have read the signs better. I failed to do so. I now see the political impact he had that year as yet another of his reinventions. He later reinvented…

It’s time for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 259 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 707. I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts…