I’ve been testing Reeder as my new RSS reader for the past few weeks, and I think I’m starting to really like it. The only thing I still need to figure out is how to handle my newsletter subscriptions.

I read someone's post yesterday about how they don't understand people who want to live forever. That they are glad that their life will eventually come to an end. I can certainly appreciate that sentiment: living is hard and can feel like a burden and the world sucks, especially in our current timeline. And I even feel low enough sometimes that I just want to retreat from everything. And I know that someday, all things must end. Eventually. But I still find myself occasionally fantasizing…

I've felt a little off for a the past few days. Tired, lethargic, headache. I took an hour nap after lunch yesterday and woke up a whole new person. Felt 100%, just like that. I'll take it! I've had a Withings scale for years. Their app has been basic, but easy to use. And by "was" I mean back then. Now, it gets worse with every update. The latest might be the final straw. There's a "Complete your profile" overlay on every screen that takes me to a permissions screen asking to allow them to…

Magical Mystery Tour to the first 2027 GBG TickTwo walks close together in the Liverpool A-Z book of City Walks. Parklife in Princes and Sefton Parks - functional but with nothing much to write home about. The second walk in nearby Wavertree fixes that in spades.My walking life has many inspirations - history, murders, pubs, folklore and so on - but this must be the first walk inspired by a song. Fighting the hordes taking coach trips to take photographs of road signs. Only a special kind of…

Last Friday I shared a fun live webcam of the Sydney CBD. I thought I’d check it out again this evening, on account of the foggy weather. It looks like the worst of the rain has passed, but it still looks eerie. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on one of the Sydney Ferries during that! By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-13.

In cyber security, red teaming describes the practice of simulating attacks on your digital systems: A dedicated team of hired security experts to attack your systems. It’s a role play of sorts — you give someone trusted the mandate to attack, to find your weaknesses. I wish we had more red teaming for policy. A hired group of experts with the mandate to find flaws, weaknesses, ways to avoid or misuse or abuse a given policy proposal. This should be a regular part of the policy process in order…

Sunshine Club Talk No. 3. Two walks. Flu & COVID vaccinations. Tech support. Me and Grace at the Cairn on the descent to Pen Tir Talk prep on Tuesday morning then over to Kingstone to talk to the Sunshine Club about trekking in Peru with Val. All good. Home for tea and scone, then caught up on last week’s weeknotes. Over to Cwmdu on Wednesday morning to meet SSG for a walk – Mynydd Troed and Mynydd Llangorse. Rain eased off, breezy on top, sunny afternoon. To Latte Da in Crickhowell for tea and…

Automattic is always 5–15 years ahead of other companies, but things happen faster now. I predict other companies will start scrambling to add great writers to their boards, because, well, look at the headlines in AI. United’s board already has Walter Isaacson. Authors are awesome, akin to founders in the startup/tech ecosystem. Public offer to all the great sci-fi/etc writers out there who I’m a huge fan of (Ken Liu, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang, Andy Weir, Ramez Naam, Kim Stanley Robinson…)…

I really need to buy one or more of Heather Parry’s books, because I get such an absurd amount of pleasure out of her newsletter/blog pieces. (Hmm—clearly there’s something to this whole content-led marketing thing after all?) Anyway, here she is, three paragraphs into a rail-focussed travelogue of a recent trip to China and Japan: Using the rail system in the UK is a protracted masochistic impulse, something you do because it’s morally right and theoretically superior even though the actual…

My 35mm negatives were scanning with horizontal scratches across most frames. It was a time-consuming pain in the ass to remove those scratches in post — and sometimes, it was impossible. It was enormously frustrating. So I put on my detective hat and started sleuthing to solve the mystery. A frame where I didn’t notice a scratch before uploading it to Flickr. Do you see it? Pentax ME, 50mm f/1.7 SMC Pentax-M, AristaPan 100, Rodinal 1+25, 2026 First I wondered whether the squeegee I use to…

I like sparse interfaces. My approach to design owes a lot to Danish functionalism, and I’m usually looking for something I can remove before I start adding another control. But a screen can look beautifully restrained whilst asking the person using it to do a surprising amount of work. I’ve written about affordances before, and the argument gets a little abstract if we leave it at making controls easier to discover. I want to work through a small example instead: saving an article to read…

Twelvety-three years ago I published my Dependable Dependencies Principle for modular software design. Over the years, I’ve expanded on it, but never written that intervening thinking down. So here we are. It’s a pretty straightforward thesis: the more depended-upon a module is, the more dependable it needs to be. This gives one dimension we can use to assess the potential risk that modules present in terms of the “blast radius” when they fail – how much stuff could that impact? Empirical…

Code example showing the CSS Typed OM, with the css-typed-om polyfill loaded on the first line. Being a big fan of the CSS Typed OM, I’ve wanted a proper polyfill for it for years. Just before my summer vacation back in July, with the help of Gemini/Antigravity, I finally built one: css-typed-om. ~ # Why CSS Typed OM? (And why a polyfill?) If you’ve ever read or manipulated styles in JavaScript using element.style or window.getComputedStyle(), you know the pain of dealing with strings. Want to…

12 Toss | INDEX | 14 Lady Look, I totally get that plastic straws should be out, but paper isn’t working out so well either. Bamboo and pasta seem like options worth looking into! Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

I love vertical tabs. I used Tree Style Tab for years, then switched to Sidebery and recently to Firefox's native vertical tabs. I like them, but I was annoyed how pinned tabs looked. By default they are collapsed, side by side, with only their favicon visible: Luckily, there is a way to change that by adding some custom CSS. After applying it, my tabs looked like this: CSS # I couldn't find an existing snippet anywhere, and it took me some trial and error to get it right. Here is the CSS. I…

Yesterday was the first day of the onground intensive for the TEEM program. We'll spend the first two days of the week learning about Lutheran Liturgy, then a Wednesday workshop on Lutheran polity, and we'll finish with a class on Old Testament prophets. We begin each day with worship/devotion time at 8, and we go until 4 or 5, depending on how much time we take to eat lunch that is brought in for us.It's an intensive, not a relaxive, and the contrast with Sunday is huge. Sunday was a…

Journaling can be a wonderfully rewarding practice, done for many different reasons. Some people keep a journal to help them cope with difficult life situations; for others it's a way to record important moments or reflections on past experiences. As an educator, I always encourage students, regardless of which level they're at, to keep a journal in (or about) the language they're learning.

GPT-6.1 Sol now defaults to 500K context in Codex! But note: GPT-6 Astra still defaults to 272K (at least as of writing, Oct 13). Recently, OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux announced the increase for GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex and Work. Sol went from 272K to 500K, roughly 80% more room. Tibo says they tested this size carefully to reduce compactions while keeping more context and nuance through long tasks. That’s useful when a task spans a lot of code, rejected approaches, and constraints. Both Sol and…

Daily Drawing 1017

I do not believe in god, and while I’ll concede there are some aspects to organised religion that can do good, on the whole I don’t think religion is a good thing. I’ve felt this way for a long time now, and when I’ve mentioned my non-belief to believers in the past, the discussion usually ends up at a similar place, with a familiar question. If you don’t believe in God, or anything particularly spiritual, where do you get your morality from? And looking at it from the point of view of a…

The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy, 1974. Mildred Hubble is a girl at Miss Cackle’s Academy for young witches, but she can’t seem to do anything right! It’s only about halfway through her first term, and it seems like she’s always getting confused and making the wrong potion in her potions class. Then, when she gets into a fight with a snobby girl named Ethel, she accidentally turns Ethel into a pig instead of a frog. When the girls at school receive their black cats, they run out of black ones, so…

Robert Birming wrote about a /photo page. And I like that idea. Just a photo, of something. And every now and then, update it.

Everybody knows that Cincinnati is the City of Seven Hills and yet, despite the inability of anyone to actually agree on which hills constitute the canonical heptad, we accept it on faith that there are precisely seven hills; no more, no less. We ignore the geologists who patiently explain there are, in reality, no hills at all in Cincinnati and that the topography we refer to as hills is technically an eroded peneplain and blah, blah, blah. Despite all evidence, we accept it as indisputable…

Most people think of a BrightSign player as a thing that plays - you load it with content, point it at a screen, and it pushes pixels. And yeah, if you’ve ever wired an RTSP camera feed into one, you know it’s a perfectly nice way to throw a live camera (or a few) on a wall. But that’s selling the box way short. There’s an NPU sitting in there, idle, and it can watch the room back.

I went to a nearby one-day ukulele festival.

Last night I watched Dolly. Well half. I turned it off midway. I couldn't. A lot of gore and not a lot of substance. I couldn't get down with it. #dolly #movies #film #horror

Lennier We let Lennier go this afternoon. He’s the oldest dog we’ve ever had at 16 years, 4½ months, and was happy and active until the very end. Which is a miracle because he had a crazy amount of things wrong with him, including Megaesophagus, Myasthenia gravis, and some sort of inflammatory bowel disease. He got a steady dose of medication by the end, eight different times during the day and night. He came to us on March 31st, 2012 from Andrea’s mushing partner Bonnie. He was part of a…

Not so nice today. Dull and cloudy but mild. Mopped office out. Did Ted’s T. Cut the creeper from round kitchen window. Cut some wood up. N gone to Dot’s.

This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Book Covers Featuring Autumnal Colors (submitted by Wordy Witterings).” This was more difficult than I expected, but I’ve managed to find ten covers featuring shades of orange, gold, brown or dark red. These are all books I’ve read and I’ve provided links to my reviews. 1. The Autumn Throne by Elizabeth Chadwick 2. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson 3. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 4. Towers in the Mist by…