This is a sequel to Signs of times.To be found in National Gallery of Modern ArtPune is notorious for its "Puneri Patya" or signposts which are short, sharp scoldings essentially. The one above is at a temple. The three(!) signs in the photo say:Don't keep your unwanted items like photos, idols, devhara (household shrine), cupboards, etc from your home in this math (मठ).When distributing prasad, use a spoon and plastic gloves.Donations will be accepted here.From the same temple:Top left says:…

This movie surprised me with a couple of very cool choices and scenes. The low-budget film look is juxtaposed with solid dialogue, and the ending… Well, it is original, at least. I want to see its “sequels”! Rating: 🫨Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

This is my second book for this week’s 1949 Club (hosted by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book). I’ve loved some of Rafael Sabatini’s other novels, so I was pleased to find that he had one published in 1949. Sabatini was born in Italy to an English mother and Italian father; he was an accomplished linguist and wrote all of his novels in English even though it was actually his sixth language! The Gamester was Sabatini’s final book, published a year before his death.…

CrUX adds experimental Core Web Vitals for SPA soft navigations, while Firefox and Safari improve cache evidence, image delivery, and rendering.

What a surprise! This little gem combines inspired visuals, a perfect soundtrack, and a lovely story. A few perfect characters and a simple plot. I’m glad I watched it! Rating: ❤️Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

Apple Newsroom, during Tuesday’s “Welcome Home” press briefing in New York: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music and making FaceTime calls to home monitoring and hands-free automations with voice control — all designed with privacy and security at the core. HomeView…

Due to other commitments I have hit the pause button and there will be no blog post this week Normal service will be resumed next week!

What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM). AP English and damn near a minor in English during my undergraduate degree means that my box of literary tools and techniques was filled during my earlier educational endeavours. However, I believe I can dive deeper into literary craft and identify weaknesses in existing writing. Unit Readings: Words Are My Matter — Ursula K. Le Guin The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness — Walter Benjamin Why these two together Having never read either of these books,…

The new era of building age maps has begun. Block and Paper have been busy recently creating animated building-age maps of cities around the world, showing urban development unfold over time. The style has since been emulated by others, including Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County.Now Alexander Bogachev has imported the idea to France, creating an animated building-age map of Paris that shows when each of the French capital's 122,435 buildings was constructed.Paris, Building by…

Over years, I’ve been talking photos of random signs that I find interesting. I’m throwing some of them together in this note to create some sort of photo-note. This post was originally published on abhinavsarkar.net. First my favourite kind, the cautioning ones: Asphyxiation is a nightmare thought to me. I’m not sure why they have spaces with hazardous atmosphere in a workplace, but I’m glad they put a big sign. Rest of these photos are also taken in my office, except the radiation warning one…

This is part of an ongoing series about the preparations I've made to run Mongoose's revised edition of the Bayern campaign for 2300AD. Spoilers for Interlude 7.

Burger and David, recovering from the transplant October 15 marks the second anniversary of my spare kidney’s relocation to its new home. Burger, retired surgeon, avid pickleballer, violinist, luthier, and sailing friend, is doing great with his new kidney. And so far, the kidney seems happy with its new neighborhood. View fullsize View fullsize The transplant center has been thorough about follow-up testing. For me, that meant lab work at one week, three months, six months, one year, and…

Dial H For Hero #2 Date: August 2012 Publisher: DC Comics Cover Price: $2.99 Stats: 20 color pages plus ads Writer: China Miéville Artists: Mateus Santolouco, Tanya & Richard Horie, Steve Wands, Brian Bolland Notable Notes: Crazy superheroes battle Darren's old gang! Superhero Variety Hour! Did you ever dream up your own superheroes when you were a kid? (Do you still do that?!) I sure did. Mostly I pretended to be Daredevil, but sometimes I would make up my own super powers - like magical…

For the last couple of months a lot of my spare time has gone into Cheltenham Open Data. It started because I wanted one place to check things about where I live: house prices, planning applications, fuel prices, flood warnings, bus disruption. All of it is public, but it’s scattered across council PDFs, government spreadsheets and APIs that nobody outside a dev team would ever look at. So it pulls everything together and refreshes on a schedule. Fuel prices update hourly, care home ratings…

Acorn bucket I recently came across this bucket at one of our local coffee shops — a common drop and collection point for free goods, from books and magazines to excess zucchinis and figs. The bucket and its sign reminded me how much I like this dusty little town and its inhabitants, human and wild. So I called Jeff and asked him if I could write a blog post about the acorn collection program. He obliged with an enthusiastic rundown, emphasizing that I should really call the folks at the zoo…

Not a bad day at first but rain later. Did all Ts and cleared the silage lab again. Raked some leaves from by from door. Cleaned copper in BR. Dot and Jane at home.

Sometimes it’s enough to know that something is possible, even if you never achieve it. I’m drawn back to playing Frontier as a kid. I played a lot of that game in a very shallow way. I travelled between stars, trading for a modest profit, trying not to get killed by pirates.I barely ever managed to upgrade my ship. I didn’t find the weird space-jousting combat fun, so never engaged with the bounty hunting missions. I read in the manual that you can set up a mining rig on a planet and come back…

I don’t have space for this project. There, I’ve said it, it is in black and white, I do not have space to build the layout these models, these dreams need…North of Drumheller, August 1999. James Hilton photo.At the weekend a box of six wonderful dream carriers, sorry grain cars arrived from Vancouver. There are more to come too, but already the excitement of lining them up and seeing my Canadian grain train expand to 400% its original size is almost indescribable.At the weekend I also began to…

Duvel's Tripel Hop IPA range is a fun bunch of beers, and I like that the brewery has resisted the urge to fire out new ones every couple of months. No need. The Citra and Cashmere regulars are plenty to enjoy. At the same time, I don't object to them being joined by Tripel Hop Krush, although I notice it is somewhat weaker than its 9.5% ABV siblings, and indeed regular Duvel, as it's only 8.4% ABV.In the glass it's pale and hazy, as Duvel tends to be, and the dry-hopping doesn't leap out in…

Double Maths First Thing had to look up where Wells is Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in the beauty of maths, and the human effort of figuring things out. This week I’ve been taking joy in simplifying and clarifying code that wasn’t quite right last time it was deployed. With a bit of space and distance, I was able to see a neater way of dealing with the edge cases and – even better – a neater way of explaining what was going on.…

Well, chaps, the news has finally filtered down to the bankside, and it’s fair to say it’s left a bitter taste in the mouth. Sharper than any hop, that's for sure. They’re shutting down Marston's. The historic cathedral of brewing in Burton-upon-Trent is to be boarded up by the summer of '27. Out with the Union sets, in with the corporate spreadsheet.Now, you might be sitting there, scratching your head, wondering what a boardroom decision by Carlsberg has to do with a bloke sitting on a damp…

A song that reminds you of one of your favorite places. I had been there many years ago, I think. My childhood was largely built around parks and gardens, walks in forests and shopping centres. I always loved being outdoors. So I presume I’d been to this place before Becca took me there. It fit the bill, country walks among the trees along well-trodden paths. Quiet, but accessible, secluded but not hidden. We walked and talked as the dogs ran ahead, following trails through towering pines,…

As web developers, we’re constantly working with websites with different types of content and ways to craft that content. Whether it’s a handcrafted blog, a WordPress site or a web app, these days you likely have a bunch of images out there: some decorative, others with meaningful messages. I built Alt text debugging bookmarklet (ATDB among friends as it rolls off the tongue nicely), a quick tool for website developers and authors to check the status of alt texts of images on a site. I use it…

The riverbanks of Paris are magical. On a sunny afternoon when they fill up with people, they're among the most beautiful urban public spaces I know. I made this copperplate engraving, "Quai des Célestins", at Imprimerie ARTE, using a combination of line etching and aquatint. The view is from one of my favorite spots on the Right Bank, looking across the river toward Île Saint-Louis. Signed and numbered prints are available from my website and from Galerie Maeght. Their gallery on rue du Bac…

I genuinely enjoyed being part of Head in the Cloud by mittwald this year. Now they released the video of my talk (it’s in German, sorry), which was titled “Weniger Slides. Mehr Austausch.” (something like “Fewer slides. More interaction.”). Next to this, I gave a couple of interviews. One of them dealt with the how people these days see events and what is important for them. I proposed that it could work to run an event with even fewer talks than at beyond tellerrand, but more tome to chat and…

October 14, 2026 Our last heroine, but NEVER the least! In my next life, I’m going to major in French, and make my living translating arcane French documents buried in the Bibliotheque Nationale… And I will use this painting as my inspiration, just as our current historical architecture expert does: When she left for her autumn term teaching in Paris, she had this wardrobe. I suspect that she packed everything – 40 garments isn’t insane for 4 months if you’re in one place, and can unpack, hang…

Yes, they have.. I begin with a history of how policy elites defined “success” in school reform between the late 19th century and mid-20th century. In those years, classrooms, schools, and districts that practiced “efficiency” in expanding access for students to public schooling, following scientifically designed procedures in creating appropriate curricula for each level in age-graded schools, and using public funds parsimoniously and wisely were labeled “successes” (see here) Using scientific…

So a little while back, comics artist Steve Lieber posted to his Bluesky account a piece of work of such shocking significance to the artform — nay, to the world — that I could not help but message him and ask how I could acquire this immortal piece. Alas, quoth Steve, the illustration existed only in digital form, but he would be happy to reproduce it upon physical media, the nigh-mythical “ink” and “paper” treasured by our forebears, and send it to me via the postal mails with all haste. And…

KBF on GDB! Let's go. This is a random selection of slide scans. First up is this shot of Seldom Seen Slim, who used to be sort of an unofficial mascot of Knott's. The prospector with his trusty burro, wandering the west looking for gold. Gooooooold! It makes me sad that Slim and his burro (I call him "Biscuit") have been removed, it seems unbelievable that there wasn't room for this statue anymore. Slim was based on a real person named Charles Ferge. I'm unclear as to when the SSS statue…

Never Say Never Again (1983)