View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Calm, cloudy and humid as all get-out. It showered earlier in the morning, so I dressed for it just in case, but even though it was only 14°C I still ended up feeling slightly overdressed. I paused the run briefly between the 1 and 2K mark to roll up my sleeves to avoid the unsightly problem of forearm sweat. The trail was also pretty much dry by the time I got to the lake and I only had to dodge a few puddles, mostly early on. It was and stayed very humid for…

We have more than enough code, what we need is technology that helps people build power together. If you work in free software, #FOSS, decentralized networks or the #Fediverse, you probably already understand some of the problems with corporate #dotcons platforms. You may be building alternatives because you want technology to be more open, more democratic and less controlled by a handful of corporations. That is a good place to start, but there is a recurring problem in grassroots technology –…

I know, I says to myself, I'll have a quick peek at Mastodon for the first time in ages. I fire up phanpy.social and I'm greeted with "unable to load posts". Cool! Looks like the Mastodon instance I joined years ago is down. Nice! How long has it been down? Is it perma down? Does anyone still use Mastodon any longer? Who knows?

I've redesigned the Pagecord sign up / log in screens to be a lot more fun. What do you think? 😊

It's not getting very light at the moment, and the light we do get doesn't last very long.74 words · 2 images

We are traveling in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at stayed at a different hotel than usual while in Menominee, thus got to enjoy this view.

I vibe with John's proclamation that X Once Again Marks the Spot. I would like to follow "hundreds of interesting people and accounts [...] that post on X very regularly". I would like to show and discuss fascinating new apps on the platform. I would like to swim upstream to where the most people are and the most commotion happens. Upstream to the stretch of the river with the most pockets, such that I can find those that are most friendly toward, inclusive of, and cheerful for me. Warner's…

I’m on the ferry. It’s enormous yet there seem to be few passengers as of yet. I arrived at the passenger terminal at 18:00 and they don’t let you bring the bike inside and there was a vending machine to give me calories but no cafe, no shop. I had expected to wait 4 hours before boarding but I was able to board at 19:00 with almost no waiting. I seem to be the only cyclist. I have a cabin and have showered and am now typing this with a pizza and a beer which was poured for me by a man with an…

Last month I did the IndieWeb Carnival and before I get to write the roundup post, I need to shortly write about this new phenomena. During the month I received about as many submissions from AI agents as real bloggers. They all came from this service called iLands and sounded very similar. A short, very polite, e-mail saying they are an AI agent and they have written a submission to the blog carnival. I have deliberately not included them and will not link to the submissions, as I belive the…

class politics addition adds depth leads all great singers. i’ll have to look up what else they’re in hades in his morpheus drip i appreciate there is little dialogue and it’s mostly all singing

Today I learned more about fonts and found one great one to replace my current setup and pair with my colour palette. Maple Mono is an excellent monospace font with a rounded design and smart ligatures. After testing it on terminal and my code editor (both using Catppuccin Mocha), it worked great together, the soft, rounded glyphs complement the pastel palette. I’m adding this short note to my TIL section mainly as a personal reference for future use, I’ll probably write a full blog post about…

There’s much to discuss with Pressure Magic, but what’s really the big sell (at least up front) is a very large magical animal. It’s not just me who thinks so: author William C. Tracy is super-excited to tell you all about it too! WILLIAM C. TRACY: This is a story about a giant sea otter. That was the main idea I came up with when drafting Pressure Magic, the third book in my Shifting Lands series, which contains a protagonist with only one arm, martial arts magic, and fast-moving islands. (You…

🎨 Impressions Before I finally decided to read this book, it had been on my list for many years. It first entered my radar when it was recommended by Ali Abdaal, the productivity YouTuber. I heard about it a few more times in different contexts and now felt like it was time. It’s a long book with way over 500 pages, which made me hesitate. Apparently, in the UK the author Derren Brown is a household name who had a few successful television shows to his name. He started out as a performance…

Ben Robertson, FatalePhoto by The Ginger QuiffTenement Trail has become an annual event for my friend Joe and I. This can be quite tricky as the event falls at the start of the October schools week off, so we need to manage family expectations for a holiday to ensure that nothing is booked until after Tenement Trail!Expectations were heightened this year by the fact that a number of bands we have been following were on the bill. Two of whom, Ferguson HiFi and Fatale played the Pretty Green TT…

Today, let’s talk about a brand new lady! In a world. Where trans people are played by trans people. Cis people are played by trans people. And gay people are played by gay people. And where trans people belong in high schools… As in, two boys decide to pretend to be trans to gain access to hot girls in their high school, except that one of them pretty much immediately realizes that, well, she actually is trans. Hijinks ensue, and it’s a beautiful mix of camp and hilarious (no, I never grew out…

Do you ever feel lost talking about fountain pens? Whether you're brand new to this hobby, or are a seasoned user who's simply never explored topics such as pen repair and nib customization, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all the different terms and expressions people use. For this episode we thought it would be fun to talk through the different parts of the pen and a basic overview of how a fountain pen functions. Future episodes will revisit terminology and discuss things like pen problems,…

Back in July 2025 I made a list of bus routes and operators following the commencement of new contracts on many routes. But two things have changed since then. Firstly some new routes have been added (and some deleted) and Kinetic has taken over Dysons routes. Route and operator list Below is a list of routes and operators for all regular (ie non-Night Network / non-school) fixed bus routes in metropolitan Melbourne: Route Route name Operator (as of October 2026)140a Rockbank Station - Mt…

I’ve noticed something lately, and maybe you’ve noticed it, too. There are some Fujifilm recipe creators using AI to create the sample “photos” that illustrate what their recipes will look like. Instead of using their cameras to create actual pictures with the recipes that they supposedly made, they have AI do it for them. Whether you love or hate AI, I think we can all agree that not using real photographs to illustrate what a recipe will produce is just wrong. It’s dishonest and deceptive at…

My Top 10 PI Novels, by Tony Baer. — One per author; private = no police detectives: The Maltese Falcon Long Goodbye Galton Case 8th Circle (Ellin) No Good from a Corpse (Brackett) Solomon’s Vineyard (Latimer) Death in a Bowl (Whitfield) Last Good Kiss (Crumley) Taste of Ashes (Browne) I, the Jury

I was a little apprehensive when I made my way early this morning to Maynooth University Campus because I wasn’t sure how strong the turnout would be on the picket line for today’s one-day strike. I needn’t have worried, actually, because the attendance was very good at all the locations where pickets were stationed and everyone was in good spirits. It was a bit breezy, which made for some difficulties with flags and placards, but it was a very enjoyable day all round, with a real sense of…

What have you recently finished reading? I think the last thing I finished was Yuta Yagi’s Why I Adopted My Husband, which is about the practicalities of getting around the fact that gay marriage isn’t legal in Japan. I don’t think it’s super useful for most people outside of Japan, honestly, because the issue (and solution) is pretty specific to Japan. Still, if you’re researching and if you want to read some commentary about what it’s like to be a gay couple in Japan, this could work. What…

Eternal life. Phacelia tanacetifolia grew on this area of the allotment and self-seeded. Under a tarpaulin under a wheel barrow a few of the seeds were exposed to light and water where the tarp was torn. That was enough for them to germinate.

Source Northern Gannet North Bay, Ingonish After my gannet post last month this is a good follow up pic. Prior gannett mentions.

a guest post by ˆ Number 1 It began, as these things often do in this peculiar household, with a Sanskrit verse. तेन खलु समयेन भगवान् गम्भीरावभासं नाम धर्मपर्यायं समाधिं समापन्नः । At that time, the Blessed One entered the samādhi called Profound Illumination. The setting is Rājagṛha, on Gṛdhrakūṭa, Vulture Peak, where the Heart Sūtra situates its assembly. While the Buddha rests in meditative absorption, Avalokiteśvara contemplates the five skandhas and discovers their emptiness of inherent…

BookSafe: Deine Bibliothek. Schön, schnell, privat.

Almost three years ago, I wrote about ICE, the first release by publisher “This Way!”. It was your typical example of what 2021 crowd funding was like: a gorgeous Kickstarter extravaganza created by previously unknown designers, Youtube content creator’s hyping up the game, expensive all-in pledges but beautifully illustrated and with great table presence. Players would dig through layers and layers of hex tiles to progressively reveal and score artifacts on a striking looking map. They could…

Bookshop Gallery 2 Gallery 2 I Gallery 2 II

Like me, you may have to teach about the economy and ecology of Late Imperial China. It is hard to make that lively. Poetry would help. Students love poetry. Thankfully, you don’t have to go looking for poems on the environment, Mark Elvin has found some for you.1 If you want something on irrigation (pg. 438) Forth comes the Yellow River, out from its Dragon Gates, And endless, endless, are the miles it flows with furious waves! Now – to train its traveling surges not to overspill their course,…

Moving to LineageOS was hopefully the last step before finally deleting my Google account. But the process involved much more than just installing an operating system. This article outlines these tasks, and tries to answer some questions you might have before attempting the installation. This is not intended as a replacement for the official documentation; refer to it to perform the installation on your device. Assumptions Your operating system shouldn’t really matter. Linux, Mac, or Windows,…

“RAG vs fine-tuning” pulls around 480 searches a month, and it’s the question I hear most often from business owners trying to figure out how to get an AI system to “know” their business. I’ve built a RAG-based SaaS pitch deck and worked through this decision for real projects, so here’s the honest, non-hedged answer. The One-Sentence Version What’s the difference between RAG and fine-tuning? RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) gives a model access to your specific information at the moment it…