“The weekend mindset is an invention overdue for radical reinvention,” writes freelancer and Zoom jockey Richard Morgan. Most people’s Saturdays, it seems, are as busy as any weekday, while Sundays are no longer sacrosanct. The weekend was once the week’s well-earned dessert but its ice-cream has long been melted by the burdensome breach of busyness. The slop we now have can perhaps be refrozen, but it will never again be the confection of yesteryear. Besides, if we’re gradually learning to…

When you really picture a future situation, with the place, the people and the small details, you are doing more than daydreaming. Your brain builds a scene out of what it already knows: memories, facts and past experiences, recombined into something that does not exist yet. The more concrete the scene, the more believable it becomes. Then your brain starts looking around. Which needs could I meet here, which goals move closer? The motives that come up first tend to matter most, because they…

Letters from the turn of a century, 3The third and last, for now, of my series on Art Nouveau lettering from Manchester. If you look up the architectural history of the Vine Inn on Kennedy Street, you’ll find out how it occupies two buildings, one originally an 18th-century town house and one part of an adjoining 19th-century textile warehouse. The town house is recorded as a pub by the 1880s, but the joining together of the two buildings occurred, according to CAMRA, as recently as the 1970s.…

Dead on impact. And she asked if there’s a pulse. There wasn’t. I know now, having looked it up weeks after. I know now what neither of us knew then. What we wondered. I sat in the car, 70MPH, thinking I don’t know if he’s dead or alive but I’m glad I’m alive. I don’t know if I will be dead or alive tomorrow but I’m glad I’m alive now. That moment is closed with a bow on it now. Over. Wrapped up. For me at least. “There was time for us” sings Pinc Louds. Before we knew that things would end…

Source Steens Mountain rises fifty miles across southeastern Oregon’s high desert, a single tilted block of ancient lava that lifts almost a mile above the flat basin at its feet. Geologists count more than forty separate lava flows in its cliffs, laid down between fourteen and seventeen million years ago, with some layers over a thousand feet thick.On its east side the land simply drops away into the Alvord Desert, a dry lakebed sitting more than five thousand feet below the summit. The…

An agent can reshape a UI and its data requirements against an existing GraphQL schema, without changing the server for every new view.

This is quite funny. I hit my usage limit on my Claude Max 5x subscription on Wednesday and I was stuck in limbo with no AI to support me for work on Thursday and Friday. But that gave me a chance to sit down and reflect — why have I not been writing articles, posting to social media, or even replying to emails? It turns out that I no longer knew how to define my relationship with you. I’ve outgrown a teacher-student relationship, and a senior-junior one. I don’t want to treat people like money…

Warning for bugs... I was looking at the photos I have taken so far this year, and I think these photos of a large stripey fly sitting on a massive log of petrified wood might be the nicest ones I have taken all year. They are not particularly good, but every time I look at them, I think, "Damn, I sure as hell photographed that bug. It is large, it is in focus, and it's sitting on something pretty. Nice!!" I took these in Petrified Forest National Park. I have no idea what kind of fly it is! It…

If today were a genre, what would it be? Pick a matching song. It’s a birthday weekend! Today we have Jacks’ party, and tomorrow we have his cousins party. To say Jack is excited for his party is an understatement, we’ve just got to try and keep him calm adjacent until this afternoon! “Get The Party Started” by Shirley Bassey Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist View original post on Crucial Tracks Thanks for…

croc (github) Easily and securely send things from one computer to another 🐊 📦 [ 📌braveterry ] How to build a printer While looking for a nicer way to send things to it, a thought struck me. If it looks like paper, it should act like paper. I should be able to print on it. [ 📌lazysoundsystem ] This detailed write-up is a bit technical - a cool idea,imo! Canvas Browser Open many websites side by side on one infinite canvas, each one running in a remote browser in the country you choose. Free, no…

I'm not updating my personal Mac so this isn't relevant to me but this script turns off all the Apple Intelligence shit on MacOS and gets the model space back. I did link to this post from Cory but it's worth linking again now — this is like the sabotage field manual for the modern web. Crawler Zoo is fun. Blake made his own Solitaire game and I got distracted for a lot longer than I should when he linked it. Da Vinci, the guy who totally "invented" the helicopter, drew some legged penises in…

There's something special about the combination of apples and warm baked goods on a crisp autumn day. This Caramelized Apple Cornbread brings together those comforting flavours in one simple delicious bake. Sweet, golden apples are caramelized in butter along with some sugar and spices before being folded into tender cornbread that's perfect served warm with butter and honey or a hot cup of tea.This is a recipe that will fill your kitchen with the scents of autumn and bring everyone back for a…

Here's something you won't be able to do in a couple of weeks time. Ride a bus down Oxford Street. Pedestrianisation begins on Monday 26th October, with buses removed forever on the evening of Sunday 25th. So I've been out to do it now, before I never can again. Importantly it's not the whole of Oxford Street, only the middle half from Selfridges to Great Portland Street, but that is the key shopping bit and includes both sides of Oxford Circus. n.b. I did a full analysis of the changes in…

Another bad day for us. Really sorry. We hope to be back tomorrow and we will definitely be back Monday. Today's Senate Polls The "M" states in the Upper Midwest are back to normal. These are really blue states that Democrats should win easily in a blue wave. The "M" state in the upper right corner probably is close to a tossup. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is a tough old bird and she won't go gentle into that good night. Troy Jackson has led in most polls, but so did Sara Gideon in 2020. Click…

One week in and Wudugast has been painting like a madman and has posted up some lovely work. I think he is very motivated to knock my socks off this year and is as determined as a donkey chasing the dangling carrot. However, the donkey never actually catches the carrot does he? You may recall that week one of Orktober this year is all about Boyz (infantry). Wudugast made a rookie mistake by playing his hand long before Orktober began and said he had 40 Boyz to paint. I must admit, at the time,…

Not to brag, but I just: Compiled an IRC client on Mac for the first time. Installed an IRC daemon on a VPC …inside rootless podman …with mandatory TLS via LetsEncrypt …and mandatory user authentication …over IPv6. and I successfully connected the client to the server on the first attempt. OK, I’m bragging.

Light Up Coffee is a cafe and coffee roaster with three stores across Kichijoji, Shimokitazawa and Mitaka. I've been visiting too many pretentious coffee spots lately, so Light Up Coffee in Shimokitazawa really hit the spot for me. It's a tiny two-storey building that falls perfectly into that charming "your local coffee shop" kind of vibe. They do espresso-based drinks but I would say they specialise in pour-overs, with eight single-origin beans on the menu ranging from 650 to 800 yen (with a…

This year has been really, really strange. Unlike 2025, my mood calendar, for this year has been all over the place, especially for these past few months. Compared to last year, there are now more "below average" and bad days than last year, and we're still not even done with 2026. Despite that, I've been mostly happy. There are rough patches, but that's how life usually goes. Around July and August were the last few months where I enjoyed my "old" life: I used to stay up with friends, just…

Emacs is well-known for its arcane keybindings, often involving three or more keypresses. For example, C-x z is bound to the repeat command which – well – repeats the last command. However, there is another feature of Emacs which uses the word “repeat” and is very useful.

It is already not easy to be a human. Now add AI. Fernando Borretti: Humans are social animals who can only flourish in the society of other humans. We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left? Nathan Gardels, Noema: The challenge is not just about “disarming” the capacity of AI agents to act on their own, as the Pope has called for, but also about “arming” the integral conception of the human within the…

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let…

There was no formal itinerary made for this trip. Just a return to Southend. Time with family & friends. Time to relax. Travel In a word. Bad. Outward bound I was de-planed and delayed at Cleveland due to a pressurization system issue. Re-booked on a later flight from Washington Dulles, which at 10pm was cancelled. Complimentary hotel room and back to Washington Dulles at 4am for a 6am flight to Newark. Then onto the London Heathrow. Train delays out of London, and a win at home for West Ham,…

Saturday 10th October 2026 It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog fact checking one of those headline grabbing negative stories about public transport that appear from time to time in the media. I’m putting that right today, thanks to blog readers Harry and Lorenzo who drew my attention to a news item from Crawley which the BBC covered on Tuesday with a video clip (presumably for its Regional News programme) and online. The story was about residents, having moved into a relatively new (and…

09 Ram | INDEX | 11 Rescue 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.

When you go out for a nice dinner, or maybe just to get some groceries to make your own meal, do you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name, or do you want to remain anonymous to the world? Of course everybody will know your name. You don’t have a choice. Brett Martin, The Atlantic: Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously…

While this movie really has nothing at all to do with my themes of "local" and "high school horror" it is on the spot for the time period, 1985, and a great (if that word can be used here) example of 80s sci-fi, horror schlock. It has an alien, a psychic, the military, weird tech, and manages to rip off both Alien and E.T., and features Star Trek-connected actress Angelique Pettyjohn. Starting this one late since tonight was the Games Plus RPG Auction.Biohazard (1986)The movie is fairly…

Let's check out more Edmond Hamilton stories from the 1920s, not from Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, but from Hugo Gernsback's titles. Just two today, but they are kind of longish. I almost had us deal with three stories today, but then I realized I had already blogged about a 1968 printing of 1929's "Locked Worlds," the saga of an embittered scientist who tries to help spider people conquer the Earth but is foiled by bird people and his former assistant, a couple of years ago.To read along…

Some large-scale steam action at the Bala Lake Railway gala.

https://youtu.be/bYBzBpoa6Lg This post (I made a thing - 12 measures of blues or whatever) was last edited 9 minutes ago.