Renoir was once accused by his art teacher of only painting for his own enjoyment. Renoir replied that is he didn’t enjoy it, then he wouldn’t do it. I think that is fair enough. This video by the National Gallery in London was created to coincide with their exhibition of many of Renoir’s works created between 1860 and 1880 – in other words when he was experimenting with them and style and becoming one of the Innovators of Impressionism. It tells the story of both Renoir and his adopted home…

Back in May, in Pewpew: the terminals are down!, I drew a spectrum of ways to work with coding agents. At one end you sit with a single agent in a terminal. In the middle, Pewpew gives you a canvas to see many sessions at once. Further along is orchestration, where you describe the work and something else starts the agents and follows it through. I said then that I had my own take on that last part, and promised a separate post. This is that post. In it, I will introduce Symphonika, an…

Djangonaut Space Djangonaut Space is a free, 8-week group mentoring program where individuals will work self-paced in a semi-structured learning environment. It seeks to help members of the community who wish to level up their current Django code contributions and potentially take on leadership roles in Django in the future. I’m beyond excited. I was accepted to join the 7th cohort of Djangonaut Space starting next Monday. I first learned about the program when Sarah Boyce talked about it in…

It’s Wednesday and there’s been more progress! We start this week with Chris St and some 15mm Ancient Greeks. Chris got these of Ebay and has been sprucing them up and adding some decals to the shields. moving onto more modern times and Chris has also been painting up some 28mm Late Romans. Off to the unknown now and Stephen has finished his King in Yellow plus minions. Sticking with the other worldly Tony F has been crafting some graves for a forthcoming seasonal spooky game. I suspect the…

Perk UpOlympus OM-2n, 40mm f/2 S.ZuikoKodak T-Max 400Bellini Ecofilm 1+12026 I took my Olympus OM-2n out for some exercise before I started my new job, and I’ll share more from that roll in posts to come. This photo was from a walk through Indianapolis’s Broad Ripple neighborhood. The Monon rail-trail passes right through, and on the north end of this part of town a number of small businesses like this coffee shop have popped up. You can drive to them as well, and some people do, but this…

It's been a while since I last wrote about Vivace, my Composer alternative (a PHP package manager). There have been seven releases since, so let's get you up to speed. The goalposts of the project have shifted a little. Viv started as a viability test to see if rewriting Composer in Rust would bring benefits. When that turned out to be the case, I wanted it to become a faster Composer with a few extra features. Viv 0.14 is the ultimate version of that, and it's very fast. I'm now more…

The Retro Sci-Fi: GIF Edition reminded me of all the animated gifs I had once created for the first iteration of TIMES NEW HUMAN, the format of which was web-based. Most of those gifs are now lost to history for some reason. I've never been good at adequately archiving my output, something I've been working towards changing, and partially why Ganzeer.com is built to function as a genuine archive of all the work rather than a mere web brochure with a handful of samples. The latter being what is…

We’re on the verge of democratizing only the worst part of celebrity: the pervasive hovering cameras that are always there to preserve and distribute your failures. Cory Doctorow on Meta glasses Related to: 🌰 blockchain developers need to keep user privacy top of mind 🗨️ getting attention is the only job 🌰 social networks are designed to make resolving arguments impossible

As we’ve often discussed here over the years, the problem with stories and anecdotes about old TV shows is that as soon as you prod them, they can start to disintegrate. This can happen with articles initially look about as trustworthy as you can get, and have contributions from all the right people. Take that oral history of Mork & Mindy on Gizmodo. I didn’t quote this section of the piece last time, but it actually has a whole section on the episode “Mork vs the Necrotons”.1 Story editor…

Quite funny and unexpectedly moving in a couple of moments. A delightful surprise! Rating: 🚀Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

The director did a very good job creating tension. Some scenes almost gave me goosebumps, even though almost nothing happens. It was interesting, but I don’t understand why it became a phenomenon. Rating: 🙂Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

Ballet Twins by Jean Estoril aka They danced in Bloomsbury Square by Mabel Esther Allan published 1967 How have I missed this book? I would have enjoyed it so much when I was young, but am still loving it now. It was recommended in the comments on our recent post on fictional schools A New Favourite Schoolboy: not called MacKenzie Bly Louloureads wrote this: 'my very favourite fictional school is from a book no-one ever seems to have read, Jean Estoril's Ballet Twins. It's about two working…

Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs. As instructed by email, I rang the doorbell. I was immediately met by the two cutest dachshunds you’ve ever seen. My first words to the Westpac archivist: “This is already the best archive ever!” Pic: incredibly cute research assistant with literal puppy dog eyes This is not an open archive so I’m incredibly grateful to the archivist for having me, even though it is not…

A quiet week leaves room to revisit unfinished performance investigations and turn partial evidence into a clear next step.

The entrance to the main hall of Yushima Seidō, a Confucian temple and, with its adjoining academy, one of the most important educational institutions of the late Edo period in Japan. 湯島聖堂の大成殿入口。儒教の聖堂であり、隣接する昌平坂学問所とともに、江戸時代後期の最も重要な教育機関のひとつであった。

1903 crime, dir. Edwin S. Porter; IMDb. The robbers tie up the telegraph clerk, board the train, and make their getaway…

In the 18th century, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture to feed themselves and the nation. Today, it's around 1%. In the 1950s, there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard operators. Today, they're all gone. There used to be well over a million professional typists too, but word processing largely killed those jobs as well.This is what progress usually looks like: redundancy.Technological advancement has always rendered some jobs unnecessary. That is literally the progress!…

The Amazing Spider-Man #251 Date: April 1984 Publisher: Marvel Comics Group Cover Price: 60¢ 2013 Price Range: $2.00 - $16.00 Stats: 21 color pages plus ads, Bullpen Bulletins and "The Spider's Web" letters page. Writers: Roger Stern and Tom DeFalco Artists: Ron Frenz, Klaus Janson, Joe Rosen, Christie Scheele Notable Notes: Hobgoblin dies (or does he?) without his identity revealed! More Stringing Along... Spider-man is a great character, but he sure does have trouble with the roller-coaster…

Yesterday Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing the experiment that detected an extraordinarily elusive subatomic particle via an ingenious reinterpretation of the concept of “telescope.” A version of this essay about that experiment originally appeared here on November 26, 2013, following the announcement of that discovery. The news this past week that the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has fulfilled its mission by detecting neutrinos originating beyond the solar…

First snow in Fairbanks, October 1st Introduction The following post probably won’t be of much interest to people outside of the fantasy baseball community, and maybe not even then, but I play in a 10 team fantasy baseball league composed of players scattered around the United States that are friends with Ned Rozell, aka Chicken Stanley. I used to play as the Swingley Athletics, but when John Fisher moved the team out of Oakland I was disgusted enough to become the Phanatics in support of my…

Desert Brat 2026-10-07

Power Cat 2026-10-07

In which I attempt to write a short story every day in October, following the Inktober prompts. I tried this once before in 2023 and managed to complete (and post) something for 26 of 31 days. Because I’m a lot busier this year, I’m tweaking the rules I set for myself. Then: up to 1,000 words (aiming for 300-600), up to 3 hours of writing time, hand write and illustrate every story. Now: up to 250 words (aiming for 100), max one hour writing time, typed text and royalty-free image. I’ll collect…

"It's all true, up to a point. But never be afraid to say a firm no to cigarettes and existentialism. Drinking doesn't help either but I really wouldn't know. Perhaps that's going too far. Don't take my word for anything."From the big book of the "same name as nobody" by my good friend and fellow bass player Jules Delorean.

It's crazy to me that people I know will support total strangers and not their own family and friends. They watch hours of videos made by millionaires, they like, share and subscribe to total and complete strangers, and some will even give them money in support when they clearly don't need it.Yet when someone they know posts something on social media, it tends to be met with negativity or apathy. The same people who will share a video from a YouTuber they have never met won't press like on…

Double Maths First Thing is tangled up in knots Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in doing and discussing maths. This week I have been in error-recovery mode after drawing a wrong conclusion on a consulting project. Compared to Chris Lewicki’s classic, it wasn’t a disaster, but it’s still going to take a bit of work to put right. I’ve been very carefully modelling “how to respond when you screw something up” to the rest of the team; own…

Like many blog owners, I also want to earn some passive income from my blog. Ads are the first thing that comes to mind. Usually, when you talk about ads, the first name that comes to mind is AdSense, but I did not want to distract my readers with intrusive ads. So I wanted something that wouldn’t interfere with the user experience. I had seen Carbon Ads, now BuySellAds, on some big tech blogs, and I really liked the idea of displaying ads in a sidebar. I applied and luckily got approved a few…

In my last post, I wrote about debugging the Nordic Semiconductor nRF54LM20 when a peripheral, specifically the Key Management Unit (KMU), writes directly to memory while the CPU is halted. Or I should really say that I wrote about debugging the application core (Cortex-M33), as the nRF54LM20 also has a RISC-V coprocessor (VPR) referred to as the Fast Lightweight Peripheral Processor (FLPR). Around the time that Nordic announced the VPR core, I wrote two posts; one about its architecture and…

The crew have just arrived this morning and are about to fire up the 934. She was left slumbering in Langford’s yard yesterday and I happened to see them as I was passing this morning… The lights are back on after several months slumber, Coalbridge Street awakens… I am on the road again, taking the layout to Uckfield on the 17th and 18th of this month. It seemed sensible to get it down from storage higher in the workshop and dust things down, clean the track and check what stock to take with…

If you can always give in a little more in a negotiation, you automatically give the other side a reason to keep pushing: after all, there is still room. The counterintuitive solution is to remove that room yourself. Give up, in advance, the authority to move any further, and the pressure disappears. Not because you negotiate harder, but because there is simply nothing left to gain by insisting. This is exactly what a salesperson does with “I’ll have to check with my manager”: they can no…