Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This episode I talk with returning guest Gary about episode 4, We talk about the look of the show this season, bowling alleys and whether video games help your driving. Plus pension plans, vanity license plates and spies in a Shake Shack? Finally, will you ever want to go into a public bathroom after watching this? All that and more in this episode! For more on the slow horses, click here. Track…

Do you struggle with deciding what to make for dinner each week? Do you find yourself making the same meals over and over? Do you want to dine out less or order less? If you answered Yes to any of those questions then you need to start tracking your meals. That’s what I did over … Continue reading What I learned from tracking my dinners for 365 days in 2025/2026

Last weekend I was helping my grandmother around the house – cleaning the wood stove, the chimney and so on. While I was there, she mentioned there might be a mouse (or a rat, or Mickey himself) in the storage room, basically the room where she keeps tools, preserved fruit, pickles and the like. That sounded like a perfect job for my dachshund and me.

What have you recently finished reading? I’ve been reading a bunch of novellas, because bite-size has suited my brain well during a pretty busy time at work, so the last one I finished was Tabitha O’Connell’s Dirt-Stained Hands, Thorn-Pierced Skin; it’s a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast which I thought was pretty well-handled, with some caveats. Before that, I read Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell; I’d picked it up because I was curious after another blogger hated it, and it was…

W've made no secret of the fact that I don't like talking about myself. That's a bad trait to have when you're an author, not just because we'res upposed to have enormous egos, but because the accepted practice seems to be to share everything you can about yourself, including what you had for breakfast, where you do your shopping, what you're wearing, and what you happen to be doing at this very second. Apparently, writing the book isn't enough anymore; the author's personal life has to be part…

Music from the perspective of calligraphy: perform songs on the guitar as if writing them out in calligraphic style. First, employ triads and their inversions, use rests, maintain the emotional cadence, and play with a relaxed picking hand and a swift fretting hand.

I did a little messing around with this site’s templates this morning. I discovered the ability for browsers to popoverfor it. Earlier this year I had switched to a collapsable menu using or abusing the <summary and <details> elements. That worked just fine and had no reason to switch it besides the fact that I just happened to notice the pop-over feature. Me being me of course I had to explore that and get that implemented. It was pretty straight forward to get it set up. I had the normal…

While I’ve been enjoying the spoils of “free electricity” during the middle of the day, enabled by a fleet of power stations, juggling the power to my loads have often necessitated manual plugging and unplugging which is a hassle, in part because it causes an interruption to work-in-progress. But this didn’t need to be the case – as I discovered, there are Automatic Transfer Switches (ATS) such as these which supposedly promise rapid (<20ms) automatic switching between two sources. While I…

📷 /365 - A very peculiar and bright yellow/orange mushroom.

📷 253/365 - A very peculiar and bright yellow/orange mushroom.

✏️ #inktober day 7. Still doing my own thing 🤘 Morning bike commute through the fog. #inktober2026

Whew the black coffee from Hoosier Bloom is strong today. I feel a light electric buzz throughout my limbs. AMA. 😉

Marshal Knight recaps Dancing with the Stars 35's Mariah Carey night, on which Ciara & Brandon proved improvement without personality = forgettable and Olipop gets a starring role.

8707/21626I've had two dreams in the last two nights that I've woken up from, but that have then continued from where I left them when I fall asleep again. I don't know what that means.In the first one I was appearing on SNL US and in rehearsals, but everyone was very insistent that I was not allowed the script. I had, apparently seen it once and everyone was telling me that I couldn't have a look, however much I told them that I needed to see the script if I was going to be in the sketch.

Gourd (2026)So, someone recreated the entire Adobe Creative Suite, open-source, all platforms, in Rust. Artcraft. I haven't gone further than to launch PhotoCraft, but it sure is ambitious! Regarding "vibe-coded" apps, my current feeling is this... If an app works the way I want it, I'll use it, regardless of how it was made. ✍️ Reply by email

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start looking into a mirror and find french bistrot, cheeseburger pies, romance novels, and Venn diagramsHi there! I kinda revamped some elements of the newsletter for the new season. The palette is 99% inspired by the Fondazione Dries Van Noten posters in Venice. (As always we amplify other people's great ideas, here).New stuff is coming in the next weeks. Let's call it a "soft opening". Piero✹Matsuo Bashō, walking poet and author of things named…

The seminal parable of the AI doomster cult is the paperclip maximizer, a fairy tale (specifically, the magic mill Aarne–Thompson type 565) pretending to be a thought experiment. As with most rationalist writing, it has the logical trappings, but is at its core a story of magic, presupposing an omniscient and omnipotent machine no more grounded by the laws of nature and the principles of engineering than the box at the bottom of the ocean making seawater salty.Most rationalist doomsday…

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Sheryl and I participated in the Legs for Literacy run on Sunday morning in Moncton, and spent the afternoon at the Sackville hospital ER.Starting in January I had big plans for the year. I had a treadmill now and didn't have to fight the cold. I also had an array of workout gear and weights, something like a CrossFit gym setup, to help get strong. The other side of the garage is still full of boxes, waiting for me to clean it out so I can set up a dedicated rack space. My progress was slow and…

The thing about bearing witness to the past is that you can also see it in the present.

Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.” This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in…

Via Newspapers.comBring on the Mystery Fires! The (Napoleon, Ohio) “Democratic Northwest,” January 6, 1890:In regard to the mysterious fires that have visited the home of W. F. Miller, and which have been noted in the Advertiser, a Bairdstown friend sends us the following, which we are sure our readers will peruse with interest:The first of the series of unaccountable fires that have gradually destroyed the household effects of W. F. Miller and family occurred in August last, one and one-half…

🎵 Ben Harper - Excuse Me Mr. (Live) Filed under scraps with tags: Jam Reply by email Add an emoji reaction: 🥕 🚲 🐾 💜

On Sunday, I went through my old files looking for a St. Francis poem that I thought I had written--but I was thinking of an Ash Wednesday poem. While searching, I found an old manuscript of Jesus in the world poems, many of which I had forgotten writing. Because my time is short this morning, I'll post one of them here. Let me make sure to mention that the people in this poem are not based on real friends and relations. It is published for the first time here.Reunion We let Jesus plan our…

This is the face of a mancub who blames me specifically for the drop in temperature and the loss of the sun. I have sympathy: it’s dark and rainy, and so is my mood. THE RUMOURS that emerged sounded like the opening of a thriller. A young woman working in a Siberian research lab supposedly breaks a test tube containing a lethal plague pathogen. She is dead within 48 hours. Authorities race to contain the situation. The questions outnumber the answers, breeding suggestions of conspiracy. The…

This is a free racing game from 2008 that is entirely based around time trials. Each track is set in a stadium, there is only a single car, and each have bronze, silver, and gold times that you must beat to get a medal. Each track is categorised into one of five different difficulties using a colour scheme, from white to black. The first four have fifteen tracks, and the final one has five. The fact that there is a single car means that your time is entirely based on your skills, there are no…

By Scott_MFirst Era AdventuresOSRICLevels 1-2 Clinging to a rugged mountainside, this once-magnificent palace of a self-styled empress stands burned-out and abandoned, though its dire ivory tower yet stands, unblemished. Beneath the toppled estate sprawls a maze of chambers dedicated to the mad Empress Helene’s perverse delectations. Within may be found wondrous treasures and terrible dangers alike. Only the foolhardy dare venture there now. The few brave explorers who tested it did return with…

it is easy to believe in a big conspiracy and hard to accept that the world is complex and we just don’t know we notice patterns and relationships, trying to make sense of them but without careful scientific methods, the conclusions we draw are often wrong the conspiracy you told me is possible, sure — but it’s more likely not true get comfortable with the unknown

A simple way to make the most of unpleasant experiences: train yourself to respond with “Maybe life is trying to teach me something.” That idea alone opens the door to what the experience might actually be teaching you. Almost every unpleasant experience has a lot to offer, if you’re willing to ask.

This week, I’m trying to wrap up our paper, “The Heritage of Hope in a North American Small Town during the Cold War,” which we’ll deliver at the end of the month. Since I’m co-writing it with my wife, Susie, I’d love to get a draft of it done for her to review and critique by the end of the week? Right now, I have two substantive chunks done and I think I’m going to go for a walk this morning to think about the conclusion. These chunks are rough, overlap a bit, and are clearly not…