Don't panic. She still lives here, still dominates her humans, and still has a great deal to say about the whole situation.However, the kitty condo we got for Curtis and Celina has seen better days. They moved into it mid-June 2012, here. Which is also a fun rant about revolving doors, elevators, and human stupidity.It's been in active use for 14 years, and looks it. There's lots of places the carpet is coming off in shreds. At one point we looked at getting it re-carpeted, but were told it was…

Last week I had some extra time to burn and figured it was time to make a category tagging system for the blog. If anyone reading are familiar with blogs and blogging, a category system is a pretty common staple for navigating and discovering past written blog posts. For example, let's say you want to read my posts on antiques, or perhaps on Linux, you'd have to either scour thru the index or use the search form. Search forms can be useful, but if you don't specifically know what you're looking…

[When in Norway, and probably many other places, rent an EV.] My recent stop in Kristiansund was the jumping off point for an extended road trip around Norway. When selecting a rental car for the adventure, I opted for an electric vehicle. I’ve rented them before in the United States, where the experience has been acceptable, though not great. In Norway, I expected better, because EVs are unbelievably popular. In 2025, an astonishing 96% of Norway’s new car sales were electric. Given that, you…

For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).Myriam Gilles IntroductionWhen the German car manufacturer Volkswagen finally confessed in 2015 to having installed “defeat devices” in millions of cars in order to cheat emissions tests, “Diesel-gate” became a staple of corporate-misconduct lore. But Diego Zambrano’s book invites us to look beyond the scandal itself to the very different ways in which two systems of law responded…

Almost everyone misunderstands Chrome extension manifest version 3, the successor to Chrome extension manifest version 2, MV3 and MV2 for short. As a professional web browser extension developer, I had to migrate my Chrome extensions from MV2 to MV3, which forced me to learn the difference. In this blog post, I hope to dispel the common misunderstanding. The reason almost everyone misunderstands MV3 is that they mistakenly equate the extension manifest version with the content blocking API,…

Not having much ELSE exciting to watch, I did indeed continue watching the new Outlander spin-off/prequel,

Marshal Knight gives us the scandal! tension! and triumphs! of Dancing with the Stars 35's attempt to create its own gay Super Bowl using the actual Super Bowl.

Within the last year, a soft mod called ABadAvatar emerged for the Xbox 360, allowing the system to play ROMs of games, all while maintaining access to your Xbox account. It's pretty impressive and can run entirely from a flash drive. Having purchased an Xbox 360 two years ago, and then replacing it with an emulation PC I put together earlier this year, I really didn't pay much attention to it. To be honest, my experiences with modding haven't been all that great. The amount of work it…

I have self-published my two textbooks, Data Science for Crime Analysis with Python, and Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python. I have written about my set up previously, long story short use Quarto to compile the books to epub and a nice PDF, and then use LuLu for print on demand. I figured a blog post on why I think all academics should take this route when publishing textbooks is in order though. Reason #1 – you can set the cost. Most textbooks are…

I’d have a hard time picking my favorite Aesop Rock but this would be near the top. 🎵 Yes, I watched the documentary after hearing it.

My favourite time of the year.

This week, Nina Karnikowski’s The Writer Within asks us to find our muse. Prompt 10: Bring to mind someone in your life who inspires you. Describe them, and what it is about them that motivates you. Write about what you could start doing to ways you could start behaving, to bring that inspiration to your own life. I’ve always admired people with a strong “no”. Not the people who say it to be contrary, but someone who refuses to bend to an injustice because it goes against everything they…

Written by Morpheus KitamiThe trains must run all the time, even when nobody is riding them, that, or they didn't want a random NPC here.Last time, I thought I got defeated by an insurmountable glitch in which I could not enter a subway car. Being somewhat wise, I held off on calling it quits until you guys had a look. Lo and behold, Busca comes through and saves my bacon with a link to a post saying the exact cycles I need to fix the issue. I don't know if this is a DOSbox issue or if there…

独来独回度余生,宁愿有聚有别有人恨 风云 0 minutes ago |

Look! Up in the sky! In our last episode, we read a story by Philip E. High about a guy who masqueraded as a telepath by stretching his body-language reading skills to the limit. After debuting in New Worlds, "Pseudopath" was reprinted in 1984 in the anthology Supermen edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. In 1988, Supermen was reprinted in the UK with what I initially took to be a sort of Conan-type cover. Before experiencing "Pseudopath," we'd already read three…

President Trump's DHS raided Ilhan Omar's (D-MN) Washington residence Monday morning, thereby placing her in a good position to play up her victimhood (imagined and now real), fund-raise, and galvanize her base.I am no fan of the antisemitic, socialist congresswoman, but I strongly object to this raid, which is an obvious, hamfisted attempt to intimidate a political opponent.But don't take my word for that. Both stories linked above note that it is unusual for the Department of Justice to take…

a plan is just a thought a plan is - all it could ever possible be -- is a present-moment statement of intent. It's an expression of your current thoughts about how you'd ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply. book: four thousand weeks

In addition to this website's collection of writing, I also compose pieces on people's objects, their heirlooms, their keepsakes. For other object histories, please visit:The Heirloom HistorianSometimes parts of who we are can be found in what we keep and what we leave behind.It’s About to Start a New JourneyAt this moment, it stands in an apartment in downtown Toronto, beside a sofa, holding a lamp. Its owner, James, is about to move, and he has decided to let it go.But before it leaves the…

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.) When Jeff Haskett decided to start a “business to pay for a hobby,” what to call that business was never in question. “My great grandfather had cherry orchards in Oklahoma called Red…

Formlabs sent me a [Form Studio 1](https://formlabs.com/3d-printers/form-studio-1/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=refe rral&utm_campaign=jeffgeerling-fs1-2026-07-26-global) resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap, coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it…

John and I play a lot of video games because we make excellent life choices, and last night was a particularly Jen kind of game. I was completely lost, fumbling around and stuck on a wall, muttering "Where am I? What room is this? WHAT IS HAPPENING?" - all in a game I've been playing for 2 years now - and John joked, "You watch, you'll get Play of the Game for this."AND I DID.Meaning 11 real live strangers on the internet watched an instant replay of my character walking into a wall and…

This week at Balkinization we are hosting a symposium on Diego Zambrano's new book, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026). We have assembled a terrific group of commentators, including Nick Bagley (Michigan), Brian Fitzpatrick (Vanderbilt), Myriam Gilles (Northwestern), Jim Pfander (Northwestern), and David Schleicher (Yale).At the conclusion, Diego will respond to the commentators.

The smell of the leaves and the woods in the autumn is one of my favorite smells in the world! I am feeling a bit nostalgic still about the mountains. It really started when some idiot started a fire pit. I don’t even know where it was, but unfortunately the smoke was strong enough it was burning my eyes and making me throat irritated inside our own house. So I had to close the windows. That got me thinking of the campfires up the mountains. I can remember that from when I was very small.…

Rottnest2026 October 14 (Wednesday), 9:00PM ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au or leave a comment below…

2026-10-14Hello!I was considering writing the twist at the end, but I'll be direct: I lost my media card on the way home from New York.This was a photography festival, and the main highlight for me (besides talking with the vendors in the street fair booths) was some free time with modern cameras and lenses. What could this gear unlock for me that I would be unwilling to try given the otherwise high cost?The event organizers even gave me a free media card and a perk of two free prints. I have…

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Marisabel. To be honest, pages scare me. I mean the empty ones that I have to fill. I want to fill. I would like to fill. I have a strange relationship with writing: it is an action that both relaxes and terrifies me. It is hard, exhausting, and stressful. But it is also a relief and, sometimes, a joy like very few others. Each time I sit down to write a piece, I end up pressing the Backspace key way more often than I would like.…

Mike Jackson takes apart three common metaphors that get folks off on the wrong foot when thinking about systems: the elephant, the iceberg and the lever: When I make the case for eradication of elephants, icebergs and leverage points from the discourse of systems thinking, I am often told that, while these metaphors are simplistic, they do offer beginners an easy route in. I take a contrary view – that it is cruel, disheartening and confusing for novices to be led in the wrong direction and…

Lately, I've started receiving a few emails from readers. It feels so nice to know I'm not just writing into the void (although I don't write for anyone specific in mind). I love connecting with fellow Bear bloggers, whether that's via email, comments or mentions on their blog. I might not write as often as I'd like to, mostly out of lack of discipline, yet moving to Bear to reunite with blogging once again has been a fantastic move! In a effort to spend less time doom-scrolling, I come here at…