Once again we are entering the heart of Halloween season, which is a time of innocent carefree fun, as well as a time when we run an increasing risk of being killed by giant decorative yard skeletons (more on this later).But mainly Halloween is about fun. And nothing says “fun” like a clever and topical Halloween costume based on current events that are threatening the world economy. I came up with an idea for just such a costume, which I have illustrated below using ChatGPT and a photograph of…

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!And you're just in time for afternoon tea!A flying horse in Staffordshire.A mysterious murder-suicide.New York's war against banana peels.The houseplant that can count.Fun and games in medieval London.Hitler's dress rehearsal for war.A coded letter from Napoleon has finally been deciphered.A woman is cleared of being a witch. Three hundred years after she died. All together now: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.So maybe we've been reading the Voynich Manuscript…

Axminster—my graphical software design tool for the AI coding age—is still in beta, and it’s already been through three different technologies for inter-process communication (IPC). What gives? The reason the app needs IPC at all is to support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is how your LLM coding assistant reads and manipulates your diagrammatic model. I’ll start by showing you how it works now, which is that there are two components in Axminster—the app itself, and a small MCP helper…

One of the more important lessons you learn over time: whether a choice is good or bad depends entirely on what you’re solving for.

My last blog post on cheats apparently struck a chord with people. A few people reached out to talk about it, share their feelings, or other work in this…

A bit sad to say I’ve finished Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. I’ll be buying a copy so I can have the comfort of its presence. Next up is the book I’ve been heading toward for months: Gregory Shaw’s Theurgy and the Soul. After that I’m returning to uncle Wendell’s fiction.

Worker sweeps leaves and other residue from the western approach to Meiji Jingu shrine. 作業員が、明治神宮の西側参道で落ち葉や小枝を掃き集めている。

Long before Venture Electronics existed, Wild Lee remembers sitting in a freezing apartment playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It was cold enough that he was wrapped in a thick blanket, and at the time, he tells me, it was fairly normal where he lived for apartment heating not to run through the night. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Symphony of the Night took him down into its Underground Caverns and Michiru Yamane's soundtrack started playing. Decades later, Lee still remembers…

I don't have any empirical proof, but I am getting the sense that many of us who are photographers, follow the photographic industry, or are consumers of photography gear are getting fatigued by the repeated introductions of cameras and lenses with (in reality) minor upgrades as well as all the hype from ‘influencers’ about those cameras. Then add the much higher costs that now come with them—costs that seem to rise every few months. Costs that are becoming out of the reach of many of…

A name that you don’t hear used much anymore is “The Great White Way” for the showy part of Broadway, now at Times Square. It is a name that is unfortunately prone to an obvious but incorrect reading, and it’s hard to correct that reading because the original meaning is gone. First, a pair of postcards: The daytime view is from 1913 or so, the night view from 1917. Note that during those four years the Hotel Marlborough added a lit vertical sign on its street facade. Also note that, in the…

I'm sure you've seen vibration plates advertised online somewhere in the last couple of years. These small plastic devices are designed to stand on, stretch across, and do push-ups on, all while they vibrate at various speeds. When you usually see them, you'll see some influencer rambling on about lymphatic drainage or weight loss, but this is the modern equivalent of those old vibrating belt machines from the 20s and 30s. It just doesn't work for that. So, why would I be interested in a…

Well, I suppose it was inevitable - but sooner than anyone expected - Carlsberg Britvic announced that Marstons Brewery in Burton on Trent will close. We used to call Whitbread out for their tour of destruction of British breweries, but this closure is of a different order. Carlsberg has already, in various guises closed a lot of big breweries. Tetley Walker at Warrington - and that was a big brewery - Joshua Tetley in Leeds - ditto, Banks' in Wolverhampton and now the last large cask brewery…

Been getting into retro gaming, my childhood, these last few weeks. The game that I have been coming back to is Super Mario Land 2. I never played this game back in the day, but all the DNA is there and it is glorious.

"[I]n the recent past we have had the aerodynamic style, which has been applied not only to aeroplanes and cars but to electric irons, perambulators and armchairs. On one occasion I even saw an aerodynamic hearse, which is about as far as the aerodynamic style can go (speeding the departing guest?)."Bruno MunariI looked up some aerodynamic hearses after this, to see if people still make them.not too shabbySomeone also figured that they might as well throw out the dead person in the back and go…

V.H. Belvadi shares Photographers who inspire me.

I build physical things. My workshop is well stocked. Name a tool, I have one. Lathe, check. Router, check. Wire brushes, palette knives, rasps, sanders. I know the difference between hammers and I just counted seven of them that are actually put away. Who knows how many more are around here? I know how to build a wall out of 300 year old clay and I can tell by looking which drill bits are for stone and which for wood. I am a builder. Tools can be used correctly or incorrectly for all sorts of…

The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger put out an intriguing article yesterday, stating that four trains a day could depart Köln Hbf for London in the 2030s, and this will be done from Gleis 5 (Platform 5) at the station, and passengers will get to the platform from a terminal building on a new bridge.This idea is bold and it is interesting, and it is not a way to solve the Köln Hbf - London headaches I had previously thought of. When I wrote my #CrossChannelRail report late last year, I concluded Köln Hbf…

I've been writing about There There a lot lately. It's a helpdesk we're building at Spatie, born from two decades of running our own customer support for our open source work and SaaS apps. After all that time being the customer of other helpdesks, we finally started on the one we actually wanted to use. Our take on AI here is to aim it at the support agent, not the customer. The human owns the conversation. The model makes the reply a little cleaner and a little faster. There There is in…

A tower crane rises over the construction site of a new residential tower in Dallas. The post Lifter appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I am hurricane watching, and you might ask why. I will always keep a wary eye on any Gulf or Atlantic hurricanes--even before Hurricane Helene came to my neighborhood, I was this way. This week-end, I'm headed to Indianapolis, and Hurricane Isaias is too. I was going to drive on Sunday, but since the hotel could add Saturday night to my stay, I've decided to pack the car later today and leave tomorrow instead of Sunday. I will avoid much of the heavy weather (I hope), but there's no way to know…

Caution (2009) STATUS: Sinking unwept into oblivion TODO: Find a compass WATCHING: Nothing worth watching LISTENING: To the sounds of crickets ✍️ Reply by email

Projects I updated the homepage of this site. I’m improving my project Enigma and migrated it to Codeberg. Contributions I’m learning Go and trying to improve my skills on it, so I’ve decided to contribute to Shiori, the bookmark manager I use. My first PRs: #1206, #1207, #1209. Learning I’m reading REST in Practice. I’m improving my Go skill solving prolems on exercism.org. Owlcode.eu Published on the blog: Retrospettiva agosto 2026 Status update August 2026 Conclusion Not so much to report,…

Last week, I received a nice comment about my little 35mm Focal Length Equivalents site (short: FLE). And that was enough motivation to improve the site. I still had - and still have - ideas to improve the site, and so I spent some hours to make it a little better. Logarithmic scale The range input slider which you use to adjust the focal length now uses a logarithmic scale instead of a linear one. What that means is, that you increase the focal length in increasing steps when you get towards…

rain is in the airleft knee argues with melower back fussesmy body can tell timeI’ve become a personwho knows whata storm will look likewhat is this change? everything on meconnects with the worldaround me like never beforea woman is a fortune teller the body knows all

I had no intention of liking this, but I did like it. It's a lot of fun, but I wish they'd spent more time on the "why". Still...dinosaurs! ✍️ Reply by email

Since I retired, I’ve noticed an unusual phenomenon: I find myself looking forward to Friday, and when it arrives I feel a kind of contentment that lasts until Sunday, when I start to have anxiety about looming responsibilities. As I explained a few months ago, …since none of the jobs I had after 1987 had traditional Saturday-Sunday weekends, that inability to feel free of looming responsibilities eventually seeped into every day off, aggravating my lifelong characteristic inability to relax…

Hello hello hello. The world keeps on spinning and so do the gears of the metal machine with another hot batch of riffs to check out. Hails! Sectarium - death - CubaMutation - death - SwedenOdious Spirit - death - USAIn Obscurity Revealed - death - MexicoDawn of Demise - death - DenmarkCordyceps Corpse - death/slam - USAHexabrot - melodeath/prog - ItalyHallucination - melodeath/groove - ItalyHateSphere - melodeath/thrash - DenmarkLeper Colony - death/thrash - GermanyWerewolves - black/death -…

Good long reads this week: Camille Fournier on the manager’s path in the age of AI and how AI affects building things by Paulo André. Quote of the Week The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. High Output Management Andrew S. Grove Leadership If your team is happy, are you doing a good job? - it’s a business and happy means different things to different people.

Recent Comments dog run — Jeff: “Maybe she’s been so eager to get into your garage all this time because she wanted to ensure that you had extraction tools should her…”

CodeMine https://blog.codemine.be/posts/2026/20261001-lean-in/ - A frontier AI coding agent Tony Stark is a highly intelligent and distinguished entrepreneur. When he was captured by bad guys, he was put in a cave and forced to deploy to production build rockets all day long. Although he was severely limited by his crappy corporate laptop given workbench tools, he still made it out of there alive using his wits and non- determinism. Now suppose Tony Stark wasn’t hindered by his environment, was…