Today, I had hoped to do our second stock up shopping trip. So much for that. I woke up with my cold feeling worse. Still not as bad as my daughters have been feeling, but definitely not up to a trip to the city and a stock up shop. Which is getting to be a … Continue reading At least a little bit done…

Wanted to check out Patisserie Taisuke Endo for some time now.If I’m not mistaken, he trained in France & ItalyHe has a cafe area where you can enjoy cakes and other sweetsHe also sells baked items like viennoiserie and sables (cookies) I tried his madeleine...360 yen (tax included), chocolate tonka financier...390 yen (tax included)so delicious!super chocolatey! love!buttery with a hint

Last month I was fortunate to make my second trip to Alaska, spending nine days cruising the Inside Passage and more, including a day in Victoria, British Columbia.I was also fortunate to have a good friend on board, and during sea days Molly and I had the chance to enjoy a couple of movies together thanks to her large iPad. We watched a favorite comedy, THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942), and later in the trip she introduced me to THE MAJESTIC (2001).Jim Carrey stars in THE MAJESTIC. I don't believe…

AI came up again in the Tinderbox meetup, because of course. Again, Dr. Michael Becker dazzled us all with his creation, showing its growing utility. Again, some mention was made of ultimately monetizing this artifact of artificial intelligence. Allow me to record scratch here, and mention that at the beginning of the meetup, Michael noted the return of Jacob Evans, who hadn't been in recent attendance. He asked him if he'd seen his tool he'd been developing. Jacob allowed that he had, and then…

Life has been very busy for me these last few weeks, so it's been hard to find time to work on a review. There's been good stuff and bad stuff: my dad is moving into a memory care home near me, which is a lot of work and a little depressing, but my nephew got married in Colorado, which was super-fun and a great excuse to see tons of family...and see a new part of the country! I'm sad

We are on a flight from Houston to Orlando. We are flying United and this flight is aboard a B737-900. The interior is old enough to have metal covers over where the ashtrays used to be, which I find surprising, since I didn’t think the B737-900 flow that long ago. The in-flight satellite and wi-fi system is struggling; they couldn’t get the safety video to fire off so they had to do it the old fashioned way. They basically vamped through one. I have a feeling Valerie and the ladies are used to…

It is quite difficult at the moment to find clusters of pubs overdue for a visit (Hence the taxi ride in the middle of last week's survey) and I was really struggling today, ending up with a plan in two parts with a train ride in between.I started at James Street station, there are dozens of bars around here including two I have never visited. My notes showed one was open all day and the other opens at one, so where did I go at half twelve? Yes, the wrong one, what an idiot - I had a piece of…

goatsandgangsters:an interesting linguistics find! so I’m reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing “hp” in the context of “not being at full hp” “applying your full hp to a task” etcand I’m like……. okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don’t mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean and it’s not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant…

I like time travel stories ever since I watched Marty McFly in Back to the Future series. I enjoy all the hijinks that are typically associated with time traveling, all the paradoxes and all the past-affecting-future and future-affecting-past. Here in Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty, time traveling doesn't seem to factor much in the story. It's all sightseeing and tours for quite a while -- and also wonderful characters in eveyday parent-and-teenager life. I was about to write-off…

A cautionary sign atop the Galveston Seawall, Galveston, Texas. The post A Warning appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Wenn es bei uns Schnittchen zum Abendbrot gibt, dann gibt es dazu oft Gewürzgurken oder Gemüsesticks. Antipasti aller Art wir gefüllte Champignons, die man wunderbar vorbereiten kann, sind auch gern gesehen und heute gibt es mal wieder eine neue Variante zu denen, die bisher hier im Blog rumschwirren. Sie sind mit einem Haps im Mund und die Mischung aus Champignon und cremiger Füllung ist einfach

A moment of peace and joy. Finishing up a good book. Appreciating the soft light. A pile of grapes. Brewing coffee. A hug. Mesmerized by ripples. Mesmerized by steam. One command to strip audio and metadata and resize: ffmpeg -i PXL_20261010_162838586.mp4 -vf scale="500:-2" -an -map_metadata -1 steam.mp4 # Compare with ffprobe PXL_20261010_162838586.mp4 -an: strip audio -map_metadata -1: strip metadata -vf scale="500:-2": resize Last night we kayaked on Tomales Bay with a guided tour with Blue…

The Long Run: New research on aging and healthy living. Refreshed every night. Zug um Zug: Schachnachrichten aus der Schweiz – Turnierberichte, Partieanalysen und Termine. Refreshed nightly. Some Chess Olympiad 2026 games analysed: I used stockfish and Claude to analyse the games of Uzbekistan, Chian, India, USA, Germany, Switzerland, and Greece. All of them are using extensively AI. The capabilities of AI are improving a lot quite fast. I have written some thoughts about that a year ago.

Today we donated blood. To… pirates? The Very Model of a Modern Pirate Bloodmobile Here at Château Weekend today, we donated blood. The details of why & how are a longish story, involving a friend who lost a child to leukemia and thus sponsors a donation drive every year in his memory. We think this is A Fine Thing, and wish to support it. Somewhat embarrassingly, just after donation, I took my hand off the pressure bandage for a moment to reach for my phone, and bled all over the donation…

Reading about “The death of web development education” and how many creators really struggle because no one is consuming web dev education anymore sucks. In a recent project I was told to use more AI and that 50€ a day should be enough. Requesting budget for education, to buy a book and spend some time to learn, to become a better and faster developer in the future, always required quite some discussions. Seeing these budgets blown out for AI with the argumentation that it makes one faster, I…

Eins der Kunst-Highlights meines Jahres ist vorbei und es war wieder grandios! Ich bin so glücklich über die (zumindest von mir) sichtbare Weiterentwicklung meiner künstlerischen Praxis, sehr zufrieden mit den Neuerungen bei Hängung und Interaktion, die ich gewagt habt, und verdammt dankbar für meine Freunde und die Menschen, die ich im Rahmen von KalkKunst 2026 (wieder)getroffen habe. Ich habe mir dieses Jahr vorgenommen mehr mit Farbe, Flächigkeit und visueller Komplexität zu arbeiten und ich…

The cruelty has been puzzling me. Under almost every post which recounts the anguish of someone seeing AI models becoming shockingly good at their own craft, there is a stream of comments telling the poster to, essentially, accept their own obsolescence. If the poster calls for this development to slow down, the response is to stop standing in the way of progress. If the poster wants to nuance the picture of the machine god steamrolling everything, reply guys call it “cope” and “cringe”. Most…

There’s a thing I love about my ThinkPad, beyond Linux or the keyboard or anything like that: it’s a fun computer. That is, I use it only for fun stuff. When I open it and am greeted with the blank i3 lock screen, I know that I’m embarking on a computing session that solely for my enjoyment rather than to grind forward against my many obligations. I feel a corresponding shift in the nature of my brain’s chemical soup. And it feels good. In contrast, opening my corporate MacBook — my nicest…

‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality/society but a hammer with which to shape it.’ Unknown, but often attributed to Bertolt Brecht There is no shortage of people who decry the state of photography today, and to a great extent they have a valid argument. More broadly, such criticism has always existed against any form of art: in its time it has faced critics who want either a re-orientation in future or, more probably, a return to the good old days. Nobody can quite agree on what period these…

3 Games preordered over the last ~5 years. Two delivered within 48 hours. So, I should be getting in another play of 1833NE soon.

[Written with GPT-6 Instant, and a loooot of hand-holding. Doesn’t quite get at everything I want to get at, but an acceptable placeholder for now!] Traditional propaganda attempts to establish a particular [linear] narrative. It connects events, people, and ideas into a story designed to lead an audience toward a specific conclusion. A leads to B, B explains C, and C becomes evidence for D. But there is another, less recognized attack surface around generative AI, one that doesn’t require a…

An old piece I’d completely forgotten, along with the film it’s about, has been re-upped at The Chiseler. I rather enjoyed it. Meanwhile, sad news. Jim Knipfel, authors and regular Chiseler, who I interviewed in my documentary WHO IS BILL REBANE?, has passed away, much too young. His contribution to that film was IMMENSE.

23:11 - Bought this "easy" punch needle kit from Flying Tiger today. Took me like an hour just to figure out how to get started! Gonna try to do one color per day.

Don’t fight your biology, genes, or nature. For months, I’ve had high cholesterol levels. I’ve tried a low carb diet, more intense workouts, fiber supplements, and all sort of treatments to improve my digestion. They don’t seem to be working. Only to learn from my last blood test, there’s a marker that points to a genetic cause. And to optimize my sleeping routine, I started to go to bed around midnight. I stopped drinking liquids before dinner and dimmed my room lights. Only to learn from a…

A little under ten years ago (dear god) I tried, and eventually gave up on, building what I called at the time a "general-purpose QBN system". That is to say, a system for storylet narrative that could be used as narrative middleware or as a narrative scripting engine, like Ink or Yarn Spinner. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and I've come to this problem with a different perspective. I now think this is feasible. It's so feasible, in fact, that I've done it. What changed? Well... I…

Refusing to spend another weekend in suburban purgatory, I booked us for the opening slot at Meow Wolf – Radio Tave. Whatever my expectations, they were exceeded. Immersive, surreal art that encourages you to touch, read, and explore. Passwords and secret passageways, computers and radio frequencies, and secrets hidden in plain sight. I’m certain we missed so much this first time through. After blowing some cash in the gift shop, we went across the street to Saint Arnold, Texas’ oldest craft…

Leeds – Briggate Beer & History WalkAnother Saturday exploring Leeds with Simon Jenkins and Nicky Massen from It’s The Beer Talking, discovering the stories behind old streets, landmarks and traditional pubs. Simon and Nicky – It’s The Beer WalkingA huge part of the day was down to Simon and Nicky, who put these brilliant Leeds walks together. Simon brings years of experience writing about beer and pubs, while Nicky worked in public relations at Tetley Brewery. Together they share the people,…

We get spam articles submitted to the journal: obviously out of scope, and with many LMM "tells". I have noticed an increase in prestigious-sounding second authors, but whose emails bounce. I have always assumed the first author is trying to look more legitimate without letting the alleged second author be aware of the submission. We don't usually worry about this, since we are desk-rejecting these papers anyway.However, lately, there has been a rash of submissions where the submitting author's…

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The comment system has received a major overhaul here. It offers greater ability to format your comments. But the biggest addition is for those of you who comment with your email and name every time: you can now elect to save that info so you don’t have to keep entering it. First you type your comment and then click the “Add your name” link. Then click “Continue as a guest.” Then enter your info — and be sure to turn on “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I…