I don’t know if you can predict the winter by woolly bears but I do love seeing them. Also, I would be part of any club called “The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear.”

visconti-sforza and the polish tarot beautiful pip decks with completely different vibes. visconti-sforza is the one i already used and loved plenty. old gold, muted reds and greens, the most classic deck there is, in a way. matches the changing colors of autumn and the feeling of impermanence, things fading away - like the powerful families that commissioned these early hand painted masterpieces. i admit i was influenced to buy the polish tarot. i don't really keep up with polish publications,…

The long-abandoned Dallas Power and Light East Substation—originally built in 1920 to power Dallas’ streetcar system—decays in the city’s Cedars neighborhood. This photo I shot ten years prior to this one helps highlight the location’s decline. The post Abandoned Powerhouse appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

LLM-based software engineering keeps pushing the threshold of implementation down. Small tools I would never have built, because building them cost more than they were worth, now take an afternoon. I describe what should happen, and the code gets written, run, and corrected. It is still programming. I just do it in a different language: I describe the behavior, and the model translates it into a language the computer runs. AI coding took off because the tooling was already there, and now that…

Yesterday was an afternoon of purchases and vaccinations. My witch hat (with a veil!) was the most fun:My school will have a week of various Halloween activities in late October, and I had been thinking about a witch hat, the easiest costume. I thought about making one--after all, I have a lot of fabric. But after seeing the prices on Amazon, I ordered one for less than $10.00.Our other afternoon purchase was much more expensive: 2 mattresses for our fixer-upper in Spartanburg. We have bed…

End of a roll.A couple of weeks ago, I moved all of my Denote (Org mode) notes into Bear app on my Mac. I was feeling trapped by Org mode. I was tired of always having to convert from .org to .md and back again, so I made the call to go all-in with Markdown, via Bear. Then I changed my mind. Instead, I changed Denote to use Markdown rather than org-mode. That's better. ✍️ Reply by email

Thanks to Gavin and Chris over on mastodon and their recent blog posts about owning your music, and owning it for life, I have decided to have a go myself. Which albums would you choose to accompany you to the grave, albums you just can’t be without and more importantly need to own and touch and feel? My physical media of choice happens to be vinyl LPs. I have waxed lyrical (no pun intended) on why this is before, here and on mastodon, so I won’t go into the reasons for choosing this format.…

I have long struggled with predicting when peace will occur. Actually, I’m struggling with predicting anything relating to war, but let’s focus on when peace arrives for now. There are two such questions in the current ACX 2026 competition: Will there be a cease-fire in Ukraine in 2026? Will there be a cease-fire in Sudan in 2026? When I entered my forecast for these questions, I did it based on Laplace’s rule of succession, i.e. as a function of their duration only. This is sort of justified…

Fun Andy Weir interview, whose books I never read. I've only watched the movie adaptations, which weren't quite my jam, but judging a film-adaptation is no way to judge an author's work. Either way, the interview is fun and inspiring and does provide some food for thought. The entire part 1 of COLLIDER by Warren Ellis and Jerome Eyequem, which is being serialized at Warren's Orbital Operations newsletter. Strong STALKER vibes, but clearly far more demented. Steven Heller on his time as…

Hello! My name is Veronica Lewis and I am a doctoral student with low vision in the PhD in Education program at George Mason University. I am recruiting volunteers to participate in a research study examining how individuals with low vision read statistics equations when displayed in different formats on a screen. About the study Participants will read statistics equations aloud during brief individual sessions conducted via private Zoom meeting. You will not be asked to solve any equations,…

From a great piece by Ted Goia on Glenn Campbell: [Glen Campbell’s] father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.” In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up…

First of all, you’ll notice this isn’t 1990 by SpectreSoft – the game simply can not be found and it is highly likely it was never released. So we move on… Here we have another short game written in the Inform 6 system by Admiral Jota in 2001. This time it was submitted to the Speed-IF 17 competition. I’m playing release 1 of the game. In fact, Admiral Jotter organised Speed-IF 17! The premise for Speed-IF 17: Your game will be set on one or several floors of a thirty-story building in…

I could find very little information about this game other than what it told me itself. The programming was by Asterix/Victory, the idea and text by Gotcha, and the excellent music by Link/Vibrants. Yes, music in a text adventure! And it’s really very good indeed. As you can see the game is multiple-choice and appears to be written as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the 64 scene and cracking groups of the 80s/90s. The language is a little fruity and dated, with some words that people may (will)…

As I explained recently, I’ve been cooking for those I love for most of my adult life, so cooking just for myself can seem like a chore. And that’s even more true when it comes to desserts; it seems almost silly to bake a cake or pie or cookies if I’m the only one who’s going to be eating them. But since I do like my little treat with my tea and show while unwinding in the hours before bed, it’s either make them myself or buy them from a store, which is far more disagreeable to me than making…

We all know and love YouTube. It’s a staple of the modern web, and has been the go-to place to share videos online for over 20 years. For something to thrive for so long with such a nigh-universal audience, it’s inevitable that changes will be made. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of them all. Default settings hell Often I’ll want to watch something without it clogging up my history, so I’ll open YouTube in a private window. However this means I have to change multiple default video settings every…

In this post, I describe how I customized the linker for a NativeAOT application to remove a whole web of dependencies that I know will never be needed, but which the linker was unable to determine directly that it could remove. By using method substitutions, you can significantly reduce the size of the final NativeAOT binary, by enabling additional dead-code elimination. Background: The dd-dotnet command line tool The Datadog .NET SDK includes a small .NET command line application, dd-dotnet…

I love reading a good online article or blog post. A lot of the content I like to read tends to be tech, but it’s not always. There are few things better than finding a gem produced by a subject matter expert in whatever topic, someone who made the effort of taking all the knowledge in their field and presenting it in an accessible way. Or in other words, I can read any number of articles on the late bronze age collapse. Just keep them coming. I make an effort of adding interesting blogs to my…

Cavern of Riches was one of four adventures on the Adventure Pak release from Keypunch Software. Keypunch was one of the first shareware distributors and ran from 1985 to 1993, also releasing commercial games during that time. They did other ‘Paks’ (Fantasy Pak, Challenger Pack, etc) and yes, sometimes they were ‘Paks’ and sometimes they were ‘Packs’! Cavern of Riches started life as a PET game in 1980 written by John O’Hare. I guess this should come under ‘C’ really, but it is listed as…

Our in-house passive portfolio is having a distinctly average year: up 7.8% so far in 2026, or about 4.7% after inflation. The tale is one of double-digit equity gains, dragged down by bond fund ankle weights: Actually, the story of 2026 is the story of the portfolio’s lifetime. The equities bloc (in the green zone below) has performed creditably to amazingly. The 13.7% annualised return of Developed World ex-UK going back well over a decade is extraordinary: However nominal UK government bonds…

Adventure in Time and Space is the first text adventure on my list that was written by Dorothy Millard. I’d come across Dorothy’s name before, but I had never really looked into her or her backstory, so let’s start with that before we get onto the game itself. Dorothy wrote 16 games in all, according to an interview from 1999 I read over at the Solution Archive site, plus a few she ‘fixed up’ for other people. She lived in Australia for many years but was born in England and, like me, started…

A second post recounting a Central London pub ramble research trip made by our intrepid Oxfordshire trio.We were making fine progress. We'd marvelled at heritage interiors, drunk OBB from the wood, chortled childishly at old cock jokes, and pondered why there is a route-master bus in the back yard of the Old Bank of England.Here's the route for the day...Our next point of call was the Seven Stars, a wonderful backstreet pub close to Lincoln's Inn.The Seven Stars (51-54 Carey Street, Aldwych,…

This has turned out to be the year when AI usage has truly exploded, and alongside it the number of articles and posts railing against AI. That was especially evident last month, when AI insiders warned yet again that AI has a chance of killing us all, and their bosses argued that this is why we need to pay them even more money to develop it. The quantity of confused reportage and thinkpiecery around AI is growing exponentially, and threatens to overwhelm us in an AI Take Singularity. I’ve said…

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of September 2026, is now online at Ben Leis’s Math Off The Grid. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.

Some notes from my trip to France. Staying in St Malo we swam every morning. These swimming plans have led me to reacquaint myself with tide times - the low and high tide times move about 50 minutes each day, and high and low tides are about six hours apart. So at the beginning of our trip we swam just after high tide at around 11am, and later we swam around 11am at lowish tide, when the water was coming in. The first sign of the difference was the jellyfish we saw washed up as we walked along…

One piece of advice that stuck with me, although I know not where I received it, was to look up as I walked around a city. Try it the next time you get the chance, there is far far more interesting things happening above head height in most major cities, so rather than focus on the shop fronts, look at the actual buildings that house them, imagine the history of what they’ve seen. And maybe, sometimes, look further, enjoy the clouds in whatever form or shape they come, and if it’s night time,…

Do you sometimes want to rush out of a room and find somewhere to just scream your head off until it isn’t a metaphor anymore? The problem is, of course, that wherever you turn (if you live in a town or city), there are too many people around – and they all have a certain look on their face which implies that they, too, are looking for somewhere to try and set the record for the highest number of decibels to be expelled from the human larynx. If that is you, then look no further. Down at…

David Danks, professor of philosophy, artificial intelligence, and data science, at the University of Virginia, has been awarded a $1 million three-year senior fellowship for a project on “human-AI value coevolution.” The fellowship is from Schmidt Sciences, a science-supporting philanthropic organization founded by Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) and his wife, Wendy. The Senior Fellowships are part of the Schmidt Sciences “AI2050” initiative, which funds research to “address the most…

1949 Club, hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, starts on Monday and we will all be reading and writing about books published in that year. It seems to have been a particularly great year for publishing – I have previously reviewed eleven books on my blog and thought I would list them before the week begins. If you haven’t decided what to read yet, maybe you can find some inspiration here! The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier – After a slow start, I loved this book about…

Vita lavorativa Iniziata la fase di rilascio e collaudo del progetto seguito in qualità di Team Leader e responsabile dello sviluppo backend per il CNR. Progetti Ho aggiornato il contenuto della homepage di owlcode.eu e fatto richiesta di inserire il sito in un paio di Webring. Per allenarmi con il linguaggio Go ho ripreso in mano il mio vecchio progetto Enigma cercando di migliorarne il codice e con l’intenzione di aggiungerci una TUI.