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…

Today I have decided to finally set some time aside to something I've long been neglecting: art.

Creativity doesn’t drive my blogging; software does. So daily.baty.net is back in rotation and is once again built using Tinderbox. Tinderbox is special. I've been preaching this for more than 20 years. However, my use of Tinderbox has slowed down in recent years due to the distraction that is Linux. I felt I needed to move away from macOS-only software. I shouldn't have. I've been "going ham" with Tinderbox recently, and it feels good. I used to live in its Map views, but that was back when I…

I’ve recently read ‘The Miracle of Mindfulness’ by Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the most well-known Buddhist teachers in the world. Before reading it, I was mostly curious about why this book had become almost like the Bible for those seeking to understand what mindfulness is. I could see why the book’s messages would appeal to many people, including myself, who want to live a simple life devoted to the present moment rather than waste their lives worrying about the future. Stories like how one…

Back in the early 1990s, my articles were published in the likes of New Scientist, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Chemistry & Industry magazine, the ACS’s Analytical Chemistry and Today’s Chemist at Work, the RSC’s Chemistry in Britain, then Chemistry World, European Chemical News, AAAS’s Science, and many other outlets. You can see a (hopefully) complete list of those outlets here and read my full bio here. At the time, I was one of very few science writers regularly covering chemistry for…

“Despite its name, Android Auto is very different from Android on phones. You can’t replace the home screen launcher, sideloaded apps aren’t available, and Google services are even more tightly integrated. Thankfully, alternate options are starting to pop up, and I tried one. AARE is an open-source app that replicates the phone side of Android Auto. It uses the same projection protocol as the real Android Auto, which allows it to appear on the head unit display. The interface is familiar, but…

A bank clerk walks out of work in 1974, goes home, and reads about bands he can't see. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television. They're ghosts on newsprint, drifting through the NME from across an ocean. That's how Mark Perry tells it in The Guardian: he left school, took the bank job, and read about New York punk like a man reading postcards from a country he couldn't afford to visit.Two years later he started a magazine because nobody was going to do it for him.That's the whole sermon.…

Something I have done for over fifteen years now is to go to the museum and stream-of-consciousness write stories. I go with a notebook and pen, walk around, and when a work strikes me, I stand in front of it, and scribble out a a story as it comes to me. The idea to do this was inspired by an exercise I had in an improv class, back when I was studying theatre and film in an acting conservatory. We had to look at a piece of art and describe what we saw, allowing ourselves to embellish it into a…

All that seems to matter is the idea that the government should have unchecked access to our financial lives. – Nicholas Anthony A Whore in Church Matthew 21:31 seems pretty straightforward to me: …Christianity’s relationship with sex is complicated by Christians themselves. While some traditions celebrate sex and desire during marriage, others long wielded shame, morality, and religious authority to regulate sex and people’s bodily autonomy. And while some Christians preach moral “purity,”…

I took this photo of Truman on Monday. He has situated himself next to my office chair and he looked so incredibly content. I want to give the photo the “artsy” feel I was feeling at the moment, and this is the result Truman has approved this photo.

1 post I did have time to write this morning The five London boroughs without a Waitrose

I've been writing about so-called retro handhelds for a long time now, but I'm beginning to wonder whether the term has lost almost all meaning. It made perfect sense when we were primarily talking about little Linux-powered devices designed to play Game Boy, SNES and PlayStation games. These days, however, we're looking at Android handhelds capable of tackling Nintendo Switch games, increasingly demanding PC titles, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 emulation, even Switch 2 games these last few…

[For a memorial celebration of Ran Hirschl's life and scholarship at the University of Toronto, November 6, 2026. Updated version of what I published earlier in Balkinization, but worth sharing, particularly because I was unable to be physically pressent for the event] Ran Hirschl was a pathbreaking scholar, an even better human being, and an even better friend. Words cannot capture his impact on scholarship and on the lives of the numerous scholars he touched. These excerpts from a letter on…

The latest ‘Canadian adventure’ has been somewhat deliberately limited in scope to somewhere, imagined, in northern Saskatchewan - helping inform the sort of models I felt able to justify and my choice of ‘company’ for the grain elevator…What’s this then? An interloper?The Northern Alberta was a joint Canadian National and Canadian Pacific venture to prop up the survival of the prospector and frontier shortlines that had spread north from Edmunton. In 1980 the line became part of the CN and its…

Being all the way in Australia, even at the tail-end of optical media’s relevance, I am surprised by just how much we’ve missed out on. While we get inundated with the Taiwanese-regulars along with occasional samplings of Japanese and Indian media, stuff from the EU and US rarely make it here in volume. Today’s post is about a brand of media called “Creation Optical Media”. At first, I rubbed my eyes just to check – no, not Imation, but Creation! Originating from the EU, this set of discs was…

There's this fella that hangs out down at the local tavern, The Waterin' Hole. Just sits there most days. They showed up 'round four years back, give or take.Doesn't drink, except water.They're the talkative kind. Know-it-all. One day my buddy was in there complaining to the barkeep 'bout how his truck was sputterin' and making a heck of a racket. Just backfirin' and shit. Doesn't that fella just turn to him and start listin' off ways to deal with problem. My buddy, he'd tried everything and…

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #130, 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. A Spot of Sunshine Perhaps the thing that I needed the most, as I stepped out of my home…

Working with large diff/patch files can be difficult. If you use Total Commander file manager, my new project can help you with it. With Patch WCX, you can ➡️ open a patch like an archive, ➡️ navigate its directory tree, and ➡️ view, ➡️ extract, or ➡️ delete just the changes for individual files you need. Download latest release I also prepared a short video, where I demonstrate all these features in less than 1 minute. (Recorded and edited manually, not AI-generated.)

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is 10 minute map.My Mount Fuji map took 30 seconds.Vibe-coding might be cheating (and perhaps even the end of civilisation as we know it), but it really can help developers create online maps very, very quickly. To create my map, I simply entered the following prompt into ChatGPT:'I have downloaded a geojson of Mount Fuji. Can you give me the code for a three.js illuminated neon contour map. Add an animation to rotate around the center of the mountain. My geojson URL…

Niki de Saint Phalle? Klar, die Nanas! Bunte, rundliche Frauenfiguren voller Lebensfreude. So ungefähr sah mein Wissen über die französisch-amerikanische Künstlerin (1930-2002) aus, bevor ich Ende September 2026 ihre Ausstellung im Kunstpalast Düsseldorf besuchte. Danach war ziemlich klar: Ich kannte einen berühmten Ausschnitt. Ein sehr kleiner Ausschnitt aus einem erstaunlich vielseitigen Werk. Die Ausstellung „Niki de Saint Phalle. Dream Machine“ hat mich überrascht, begeistert und mein Bild…

I’m switching off of adalimumab and starting upadacitinib (Rinvoq)! Finally, no more weekly injections for now, but daily pills. Despite everything, I am currently pretty happy and I’m turning this crap year around. I feel accomplished at work and have been getting a lot of praise for my (new-ish) role as data protection coordinator of our department. I study a lot for my degree and feel pretty competent most of the time. I make plans for more certifications and classes in 2027, too. I’m back…

Most of us know horseradish as a spoonful of grated root beside the Sunday roast beef. It’s sharp and pungent, and grating it makes ... Continue The post Horseradish was once a sweet appeared first on Eatweeds.

I've been running Mongoose's Deepnight Legacy, first segment of the Deepnight Revelation campaign. And it needed some help.

In these past few months I have spent some of my spare time considering early retirement. Not my own retiring, I'm already well past the sell-by date compared to most, I have been considering how men engage with this period of their lives. The men I interviewed were not necessarily my age but fall somewhere before and after–they have all been retired for between two and fifteen years. Though I have continued full-time working in my temporary space for the last five months, I have experienced…

Dark Horse has announced a new manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, set to arrive on March 30, 2027. AI Overview</p>

One of the things I like about the iPhone Duo is that developers have a reason to think about what a phone can become in your hands. Open it, close it, prop it beside you, and there is an opportunity to give the software a different role. Showcase makes sense to me in exactly that context: a movie and TV tracker that can become a small companion to movie night.There is some of that early iPhone spirit here: software that gives me a reason to enjoy the device as well as use it. Showcase has a…

In a conversation between a group of software developers recently, one of them talked about how many attempts it took them using Claude Code to get a good result. The consensus was that devs who needed fewer tries were better at using the tool. But I’m not so sure… I’ve recently been spending my weekends and early mornings “vibe-coding” a browser-based tool with Claude Code for folks to use in online modular design workshops – in the definitive Karpathy sense that I wasn’t even looking at the…

One of the most powerful delusions of the #deathcult is our belief that capitalism is human nature, the way we organize work, money, resources and society is how the world works, that there is no alternative. The first step is capitalism is not a natural or spontaneous order, it is a political and economic system that has been built, enforced and maintained through institutions, laws, violence and control. We built it, we can change it. Capitalism rests on two central relationships: wage labour…

❝ I believe it boils down to the simple fact that IT infrastructure is often being taken for granted. There’s not enough priority and money going to properly maintain the IT infrastructure in various places. It’s not only companies; it’s also a lot of outdated consumer electronics that are going to be attacked. I kind of agree that everything’s moving fast now, and it’s taking a toll on the people who are defending the stuff. At the same time, maybe this is the turning point where we actually…