Mondrian flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Mondrian art is all geometry and color. What design can you make with Paint Mondrian Art? Mine’s at the top of the post.

I’ve been remiss in not passing on significant news that involves former colleagues at Cardiff University and Sussex University, so I thought I would remedy that lapse today. A few weeks ago it was announced that NASA has selected a far-infrared space telescope called PRIMA as the first in a new series of missions to be launched around 2033. The mission now enters a Phase B study. In a nutshell, PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics) is a far-infrared observatory based around a…

When did sofas (or settees, or couches) start appearing in pubs? And what does their presence say about the type of pub you’re in? Pub sofas are generally big, squishy, and covered with leather. They’re at the edge of the room beside the fireplace, or under a painting of, say, a horse, or a blackboard advertising upcoming events. There might be a low coffee table, or an end table or two, for the placing of drinks. Sometimes, two sofas will face each other, or there might be a matching armchair.…

No spoilers.

The time has come to address the elephant in the comments.Whenever my blog hits a place with a comments section the most predictable comment I see — besides some variation of “this idiot is utterly delusional!”† — is this one:lol I read the domain as “D-Bus Hell”Random commenterI’d prefer if they focused on my actual blog content but I can’t get annoyed at people for seeing the wrong words. There’s a reason experts-exchange.com has a hyphen, and who can forget Susan’s party? I’d probably read…

Not gonna lie, I love a good city builder! To be honest even some of the mediocre ones. I’m not sure what it is about them but my guess would be the combination of spatial puzzle, mild comboing, lovely visuals, and that it’s a theme pretty much anyone can relate to. From Kickstarter extravaganza Foundations of Rome to tumbling meeple madness Rolling Heights, classic Suburbia to Splotter’s Antiquity, there is much variety in this genre to be had. And all of it in some form or other appeals to…

***Spoilers*** I first read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space shortly first publication in the early 2000s. I recently re-read it, not least because I found a lovely new edition of the book in the SF Masterworks series. More significantly I picked it up again because I remembered the book's grand sweeping space opera. Reading the book again however I had my own revelation. While I had

Part two of the less sexy side of red teaming.In part one, I wrote about the planning discipline behind a red team engagement: threat-led scoping, risk workshops, Rules of Engagement, communications, environmental tiering, accelerators and the role of the Red Team Manager. That work does not stop when delivery begins. The scope, escalation routes and risk decisions agreed during planning are what the team relies on when an unexpected opportunity appears or testing needs to pause.The obvious…

My current health issues seem to flare up particularly bad at night. I was fine basically all day, and even tried to get to sleep before they became too bad, but I've been woken up 2 hours into my sleep, and I'm kinda just hoping this will pass. I'm a bit frustrated, because I think the receptionist at the urgent care was wrong about ke being billed a large amount separately for my labs. What they said made me cancel my appointment, which means I didn't get the additional care I need. And now…

I got a good deal on a hardcover copy of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, so I decided to atone for this techbro cliché by also purchasing this sleek, overpriced paperback of Bruno Munari's Design As Art (1966). Flipping through the pages, I saw a lot of interesting images and studies, and I thought I'd probably learn a thing or two from this book.Bruno Munari is an artist and designer, and I'm being somewhat reductionist here. He's clearly had his fingers in a lot of fields. He came up…

That’s pretty much the best text published following the election of the German far-right party to the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt a few weeks ago. (Best in the original German version) FCK AFD …

I just finished Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, an incredibly ambitious book, 790 pages long, which has 16 fantastic chapters and one awful one. Naturally I want to talk about the awful one. But first I have to explain the good and ambitious parts. Sapolsky wants to explain what we know about what causes human behavior, with a special emphasis on its best and worst aspects: what makes someone shoot a defenseless person, what makes someone else run into a…

I got tired of juggling scene software and a slide deck every time I went on camera. So I built the tool I wanted: build it like a deck, then press play.

Look it was bound to happen at some point. It’s like when I rewrote some stuff in Rust, it wasn’t a matter of if, but when. I’ve just swapped over my little VPS (that runs NZ Topomap of the Day and some other stuff) to NixOS, and plan to swap my home server soon. My go-to Linux has been Ubuntu since around 2008, for desktops, laptops, and servers. Even though I’ve been using MacOS since 2012, for years now I’ve been doing basically all of my development over SSH to an Ubuntu server. Last year I…

Elizabeth I spent the day in Edinburgh on Friday as she had an exam in the afternoon so we went down the night before, had a wee wander around the city in the morning, then headed off to the exam. Elizabeth is doing A-levels at Queen’s online school, studying maths, further maths and computer science. She already has half an A-level under her belt, for which she was awarded an A*, for an EPQ project she completed in her first year. The school is fantastic. The class sizes are small, the…

Lochwinnoch flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

I saw this fluid interface concept from @mrncst and, as a feature, it’s a realllllly nice idea. There’s something really satisfying about a container adapting to what it needs to show, and letting the transition between steps feel like one continuous thing. But it also brought up a concern I’ve had with similar interfaces elsewhere. When the content changes size, the actions move with it, and if you’re taking several steps in a row you have to keep finding the next thing to press. That’s the…

Another piece of solid truth from the internet: I might have known ... some medieval scribe may have decided that the symbol for my birth month should be a cat licking it's bottom. I think this is also available as a tattoo. Obviously I'm seriously considering the possibility of getting that done right now. Perhaps on my bottom. No gain without pain etc.

Daily Drawing 1015

Questa recensione va scritta in italiano. Avevo sempre ignorato Stefano Benni prima della sua scomparsa e, ahimè, fu un errore. Il suo stile umoristico, demenziale e quasi nonsense a tratti, è proprio piacevole. La satira non troppo sottile è la ciliegina sulla torta. Questo libro è pieno di personaggi memorabili, per quanto sciocchi, e funziona da tutti i punti di vista. Un bellissimo passatempo che porta il lettore in una Gladonia estremamente vicina. Rating: 🙂Hey, thanks for reading my blog…

Desert Brat 2026-10-11

Power Cat 2026-10-11

Building slides, proofing text, generating images... AI can handle much of our day-to-day busywork. Your role as a human is to do the thinking required to keep it on track and appropriately refine its output. | Read full post >>

Building slides, proofing text, generating images... AI can handle much of our day-to-day busywork. Your role as a human is to do the thinking required to keep it on track and appropriately refine its output. | Read full post >>

Frank Wiles wrote about an attack he nearly fell victim to: a downloaded git repo had active git hooks that would have compromised his system. Seeing the risks, I wanted to make git hooks more visible on my own machine.A git hook is a script in the .git directory of a git repo on your machine. They run during various git operations. The important detail to understand about hooks is that they do not get installed locally when you clone a repo. A newly cloned repo never has active hooks. Hooks…

Pick the 9 albums that made you. All of these albums mean a lot to me for different reasons. Ever since I discovered them, I’ve listened to them from start to finish countless times, and I still listen to them regularly. Maybe I’ll write more about it someday.

in response to gemini://detritus.smol.pub/1791652976 you know what, i never really imagined an audience for my writing. i assumed it's small enough and out of the way that probably nobody's going to read it! the tone of my writing is very conversational, i think subconsciously i'm addressing it to the one friend i know reads it, who encouraged me to start it? well, if not to them directly then to that "type" of relation. "we're well meaning pals here" and i assume i can just share my thoughts,…

If you’ve been following the space these past few weeks, you’ve probably seen decision models pop up everywhere in your feed. It started in mid-September with TypeSafe’s Jev, a model that, unlike LLMs, doesn’t write a single word as its output (it only picks between options you give it, and tells you how sure it is).Since the release of Jev, I haven’t gone a day without reading something new about it. LangChain plugged it into their agent harness, someone built a copy and paste that understands…

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various case and substring tests. (Note that this ends today.)

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