Here is a thing about me that I have made peace with: when you give me enough pain medication, I sing show tunes. Not quietly. Not to myself. I perform. This is not a choice I make. This is a thing that happens to me, the way weather happens to a town. I learned this about myself in 1997, in an emergency room in Minnesota, at the age of seventeen, while still wearing clown makeup. Let me back up. There was a clown camp. I know how that sounds. It was called MOOSECAMP, it was in Maple Lake,…

From Eat This Newsletter 305: Hot:It has been a funny week, with temperatures up in brain-scrambling territory. If this issue is late, which it may well be, that’s because I spent yesterday morning in the cool of a cinema enjoying a glorious restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. If you can, I highly recommend it.Jeremy’s newsletter, focusing on food and where it comes from, is always a good read. This issue is a particularly good one: mushrooms, coffee, hot sauce—it has it all.

James of the Coffee blog fame made a fun quiz, and I expected to know the result. It surprised me with a second one 😀 You are a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. You are also a Explorer To you, the web feels like a library that's open all hours and has everything you could ever imagine! You love reading others blogs, and know how important readers are to the whole of the…

While waiting for the supermarket to fail-to-open-for-mysterious-emergency-reasons on Saturday, I stopped by 20th and Irving in #SanFrancisco to check for new Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art and was not disappointed: some sort of demon-hunter magician contemplated a couple of imps.

Bonus picdump! Here are 99 pics, comics, and memes about the current algae-infested state of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot The post A picdump of Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool memes appeared first on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The bridge between the Cosmos-based Secret network and Axelar network was exploited via an infinite mint bug that went unnoticed for a week. An attacker exploited a smart contract in order to mint a large quantity of wrapped Axelar tokens on the Secret network, which they then redeeemed for around $4.67 million.The exploit, which occurred on June 10, went unnoticed until June 17, when a transaction failed with a message suggesting that more tokens had been bridged out of the Secret network than…

Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.

Who even knows, you know? An opening line like that portends an existential rambling, or perhaps a commentary on the certitude of this culture, where everyone is yelling over their own insecurities to make sure you know one thing and one thing only: They know. But the fact that we don't know has some varying impacts. Some people double down on what they think they know, clinging to it like a life raft on a stormy ocean. Others double down on the reality that we can't know, and so why bother…

My discontent with Second Life has been growing for a long time, and this is definitely something I’ve probably spoken about recently, but, you know how it is: In Second Life it used to be about creating, meeting, being social, hanging out, and all that. But now? It’s about the latest shopping event, rent-seekers looking to score as much profit off of as many people as possible, at all costs. To add insult to injury, Linden Labs has only created more ways to extract money from its users. As if…

The first step on my homelab improvement journey is setting up a reverse proxy. What’s a reverse-proxy? A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of your other servers. Instead of sending requests directly to the server where the application is running, you send them to the proxy and it proxies your request to the real server. It’s called a reverse proxy because a “normal” (or forward) proxy sits in front of client machines to proxy outbound requests to the internet, while a reverse proxy…

Like many avid record collectors my first awareness of Michael Tilson Thomas were the Deutsche Grammophon recordings which arrived in the wake of his appointment as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of just 24. As recipient of the Koussevitsky Prize in 1969 it was almost a foregone conclusion. The word ‘auspicious’ didn’t even begin to cover it. One of those DG discs – a sensational pairing of Ives, Ruggles, and Piston (start as you mean to go on) – was tantamount…

Justin Jackson on how connecting with people face-to-face can be so much more powerful than anything text-based: I’m convinced that many of society’s problems come from how we communicate online. Social media is a big part of this, but so are the text-based chat tools we use with friends, family, and coworkers. We have a Communication Problem A simmering series of arguments were getting bad, but then: We flew to Mexico. On the first day, we went to a cafe, sat across from each other, and…

A few friends of mine operate their own business. Whenever I can, I will support their establishment. All the time, I insist on paying the full ticket price. I do not demand any discounted price or deals. My philosophy is to support my friend's business; therefore, I pay full price and don't bargain. Most of the time, I ended up with deals better than market value. To support a friend's business, we should pay the full ticket price and not ask for the best deals. They already getting squeezed…

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Eric Brandwine, VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Security, told The Register something this week — picked up by The Next Web — that should be obvious and somehow still isn't, in most boardrooms: humans are bad at watching things. Not bad at judgment. Bad at the specific, narrow task of staring at a stream of low-variance events for hours and reliably catching the one that matters. He calls it "normalization of deviance" — a term he's…

The most honest economic indicator in Britain right now isn't the FTSE or the bond market. It's the number of duvets that haven't been folded since March.Somewhere in a semi-detached in Stoke, a nineteen-year-old is finishing his fourth consecutive episode of a YouTube essay about a video game he doesn't play, made by a man he doesn't trust, while his mum knocks on the door to ask if he's applied for that apprenticeship. He has not applied for that apprenticeship. He has, however, developed…

Hugely impressed by Ava Bahari here. She is truly a storyteller. There is untold generosity and cleanness to the playing and the best way I can express what sets apart her reading of this oft-performed piece is the value with which she imbues every note, be it part of a singing phrase or a driving rush of pyrotechnics. Nothing is ‘incidental’, every note has a purpose. And it’s generous too, expansive in the best sense with natural sounding rubatos. Her partner in this endeavour – Santtu-Matias…

Wednesday 29 July 2026 6.30pm Crazy Coqs, Brasserie Zedel Comparing Notes brings stars of the West End and Broadway to Crazy Coqs, Live at Zedel. In a lively and informal mix of performance and conversation host Edward Seckerson will be getting up close and personal with these musical theatre luminaries and emerging stars, exploring the stories behind the songs and the personalities behind the artistry. Fresh from winning the 2025 Tony Award for Best featured Actor in a Musical, Merseyside-born…

I have always been fascinated by the TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) on commercial and other aircraft. This video explains how it works and the simple code running the system.

Walking away from people is also important. It becomes a necessity. To stop the hurt. To prevent the future from becoming destructive. To resist the pull of staying. To let the better odds play out. When staying causes more harm than good, walking away is the only sensible step left. The sign of love is in its preservation. Love teaches you to conserve. To nurture. To let it grow into something beautiful. Even if it comes at a personal cost. Even if it ruins you. In love, "you" don't matter.…

hey machineyour masters killed all the joy in technology and everything is so unrecognizable and me who grew up yearning for modernist computing finds themselves drowning in code nobody cared to writehey machinewhen are we getting metamodern computinghey machineyou're just some nvidia gpu in some data center so why am i speaking to youis it that you can simulate caringthat's probably itbecause it feels like nobody doesi rant about ikea and hand-made furniturei send off an agent to make some…

Two mythical birds – the one immortalised by Villa-Lobos – Uirapuru – an endangered species in our musical universe. All kudos to Dudamel for realising the songful connections with it and Stravinsky’s Firebird and rejoicing in them so wholeheartedly. They were written within a decade of each other and you might even say that in the rarely heard Villa-Lobos ballet Stravinsky’s immortal bird was reborn in the Brazilian rain forest. Its ear-wormy chant, heard across flute and soprano saxophone, is…

I thought my 2019 iMac was a dust gathering paperweight. Turns out, with the price of RAM, it’s 32 GB RAM upgrade might actually be my retirement nest egg.

I’ll open the post on the OpenBind initiative with photos from my visit last year to Korea which was timed to coincide with the cherry blossoms (this meant that the customary April Fools post was from Seoul). Things did not start well on the day that I took these photos (having lined up the first shot for the day it became abundantly clear that the camera’s battery was still being charged at the hotel) and I wondered whether Great Leader’s grandson might have labelled me as a dotard.…

Main Street USD, also known as msUSD, lost its dollar peg and crashed to around $0.25. At points, the token dipped as low as around $0.06. The asset, issued by Main Street Finance, is supposed to be redeemable 1:1 with Circle's USDC stablecoin. It's used as part of a yield strategy that is marketed as "democratizing the options box spread strategy through a stablecoin". Prior to the depeg, there was about $80 million msUSD in circulation.On June 20, the verification provider Accountable…

1832 map of Ipswich, MassachusettsThis is the 11th Revolutionary War ancestor I have written about in this series. My 5th great grandfather Amos Burnham was born on 13 July 1735 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the son of David Burnham and Elizabeth Marshall. On 27 January 1757 he married Sarah Giddings in Ipswich. She was the daughter of Thomas Giddings and Martha Smith, born in 1737. Sarah and Amos had eleven children born in Essex and Ipswich between 1758 and 1782. On 26 January 1782, Sarah died,…

It's been a while since I last posted, but I've been a busy little bee, working on a few different projects... An update to Cache Out is imminent, which includes support for the Vivaldi, Arc, and Dia browsers, as well as several other tweaks both above and below the hood. The popularity of the app is slowly growing -- which is nice given that barely even marketed it so far. Progress on Yasu is moving along nicely. It's radically different than the original was, but the new version is also more…

What if your components could be contracts for runtime implementations, instead of concrete materialized components ?

As mentioned in a previous post, I played a lot of Baseline Drift. I expect lots of other bloggers will be sharing their thoughts (I know Kati is working on something, and Yakamo wrote a retrospective from the referee side), and here are a few more of mine. Like Over/Under before it, Baseline Drift was a wargame with a layer of Live Text Roleplay on top. Most players had very limited interaction with the wargame rules, essentially limited to exchanging currency with each other, spending it on…

Over on James’ Coffee Blog he has a Blogger Archetype quiz. I thought it would be fun and interesting to answer the ten simple questions to analyse my blogging style and character in the community! The results are in: You are a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. You are also a Community gardener You love to help contribute to building the blogging community, either through…

I’m really struggling to find something to write about this week, for, as usual, not much has been happening. Last Monday was a Bank Holiday in Scotland, which left those of us who don’t follow the news scratching our heads as to why the shops were shut. The holiday was to celebrate Scotland’s win in their first match in the World Cup. They haven’t competed in the Cup for 28 years, so it was a big thing. I have not been following the competition. The summer’s sports coverage is underway now –…