I have never done much in the way of advertising for decoded.legal. When someone new gets in touch to ask about legal work, if it something which we might be well placed to support, I typically offer an initial chat. As part of that, I ask how they heard about us. It is mostly “[x] recommended you to me”, or else “I follow you in the fediverse / I read your blog”. This has been pretty consistent, and word of mouth recommendations, or repeat business from happy clients, accounts for the vast…

I spent the last weekend at Pawsome - a smaller and relatively newer UK convention, with around 300-400 attendees on its third year in 2026, and my first time attending. Beside the con's intentionally smaller and more social atmosphere (the events table is decidedly less hectic to give more time for people to enjoy their shared time together in peace), the main "shtick" of Pawsome is its openness to casual self-expression in every manner; in practical terms, that means it's kink-friendly in a…

As autumn falls across Rustopia, the fun old cars start to disappear and what’s left are the daily drivers. But I did find two fun cars this month. I feature a car here when it is/could be more than 20 model years old and I found it parked on the street or in a lot. Here now, the cars. 1960 Cadillac. What a delightful find, and at the Starbucks down the street no less. I saw this car here on two separate days. It sports an Illinois plate — this turquoise wonder is a distance from home. 1965…

I got it in my head to bike to Clisson today. This is around 30km. I'm a bit nervous, but I think it'll be fine... Here goes noting! #bike #clisson #Nantes #biking #cycling #exercise #wishmeluck

closure_tree said no to multiple parents for fourteen years. dag_me is the yes: DAGs for ActiveRecord, with cycles rejected inside PostgreSQL.

Been trying a new email client, Hylki, after reading about it on OMG! Ubuntu! Really enjoying it. It's modern and has a tonne of features. https://hylki.app/ Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Rufous-capped warbler (photo from Wikimedia) 6 October 2026, WINGS Veracruz: Migration is a Moving Experience: Day 7, traveling from Xalapa to Veracruz (city) Today we travel from the highlands at Xalapa to sea level at Veracruz. We’ll make birding stops along the way and look in at the hawk watches to see who’s flying by. Versatile about elevation The birds we saw above 4,000 feet generally do not come down to the foothills but there are a couple of versatile species that we may see up top and…

This little piece is about how I make my espresso coffee and the misconceptions that fill up the https channels. I am a short black tasty unadulterated coffee drinker. I go for taste rather than quantity. At its best, I feel my pupils dilating and a gentle warm wave across my face. When the coffee is bad, I don't drink coffee. I drink tea instead, with the same approach: smell and taste first. I have been using a Staresso basic for nearly 8 years now. As I couldn't find spare parts (there are…

Over on her Substack, Kate Lindsay, of Embedded as as well as Slate’s ICYMI podcast, Kate makes a great observation: Short-form video platforms are starting to feel like there’s more AI than human content. Or, I’d add, at least the balance is tipping in a way that requires a lot of curation to not get inundated with AI slop. Nobody wants to get slopped. No slopping, please. So, here’s where she’s going with this: This is the longest we’ve ever gone without a new social media platform. By way of…

Act your age, whatever that means. I wonder how many people feel th age that they are? When I was young, teens/twentys I felt as if I was older, but then in my 30s I felt as if I was in my 20s. And now in my 40s, I feel about the same Its probably not true. My life is very different than 10 years ago. I live in a diffrent country; I have a child.

Daily Drawing 1010

Chat GPT doesn't seem to know the rents in Aldeburgh and Leiston are now exorbitant because of the towns' proximity to the Sizewell C works. Otherwise it's dead right to tell me I've created the wonderful Madame Galina Ballet Star Galactica and shouldn't put up with having been trapped living in a space that looks like a room in an abandoned care home by that most lazy and arrogant burlesquer, Flixy Trixy. I may have fed Chat GPT that last bit of information. Flixy made ratatouille. It stank…

2018 SF/horror. Shannon Moss is an investigator in a clandestine division of the NCIS. In 1997, she looks into the torture and murder of a SEAL's family, perhaps by the man himself… Spoilers.

Photo: © Stan B."The only way to deal with exploiters is to terrorize the bastards!" -Philip Burton

Is Cincinnati the home of striptease? More than one historian of burlesque has suggested exactly that. While there are any number of theories out there on just how striptease originated, a handful of historians have pointed to Cincinnati and, in particular to a publicity-hungry ecdysiast named Millie De Leon and her Cincinnati manager, James Fennessy.Millie De Leon was what was known around 1900 as a “cooch” dancer. Cooch (or cootch or hootchy-kootchy) was an erotic but ersatz style of belly…

The New Moon is Sunday October 11. Saturn is just past opposition, but still magnificent in telescopes. Mars is in the heart of the Beehive cluster on the morning of the 12th. Jupiter is low in the morning sky. In the evening, Venus is slowly sinking and Mercury is rising. Mercury is at its greatest distance from the Sun on the 12th. Also on the 12th Venus is near the crescent Moon and on the 13th the crescent Moon is above Mercury. The asteroid Vesta can bee seen in binoculars. The New Moon is…

Robert Morgan has edited some six previous anthologies for his own Sarob Press. This one contains four stories, by four authors, Mark Valentine, John Howard, Peter Bell and Colin Insole. The first three authors are in many of Morgan's previous anthologies, while I think Insole has appeared in only one other Sarob book. Votive Offerings lacks the usual concrete underlying premise, which leads to the four stories being very different. Valentine's and Bell's stories are more traditional, while…

BODHI ROOK Now with More Joints The Vintage Collection 3 3/4-Inch basic figure Item No.: Asst. F6878 No. G2608 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: #403 Includes: Clear goggles, blaster with strap, backpack Action Feature: Cable unwinds from backpack Retail: $19.99 Availability: August 2026 Appearances: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Bio: A former Imperial pilot, Bodhi has strong piloting and technical skills that he will use for the Rebellion. (Taken from the cardback. This same bio was used for the…

I was in Kenton yesterday and was surprised to see Harrow council had already slapped poppies on lampposts. It's the first week of October, guys, what were you thinking? The poppies were all along the shopping parades on Kenton Road, one per lamppost, but not on the Brent side because they're not kneejerk remembrance fetishists. The red flowers also bedecked two shopping parades in Queensbury, and are likely elsewhere but I wasn't on a deliberate scavenger hunt to spot them. Admittedly…

While I was still at ZipRecruiter, our Git monorepo was developing an annoying problem: it had too many refs. Whenever there was a deployment of any of the applications in the repo, to staging or to production, the deployment tool would create a tag object with a name like this: refs/release/stg.www.our-app-2019-09-06T114410.954-0700-treesha-179dab6fd11bee5195f0f8e31cea3edfb86ae23b The tag contained the targer tier of the deployment (stg here, for “staging”) and the app name and class of hosts…

Desert Brat 2026-10-06

Power Cat 2026-10-06

My first watch was a Swiss analog watch from an unknown brand1. It was given to me by my parents and had a Hilti logo on it. They most likely got it for free when they bought something. By the time it finally broke, smartphones were gaining popularity. I was using an LG Cookie (and later an iPhone 3G) at that time. It didn't make much sense to spend extra money on a watch when I could see the time on my phone. I always missed the ease of seeing the time on my wrist, though. For the years to…

The Prime Minister’s conference speech was a week ago, but there is still plenty of confusion about how it should be interpreted. Indeed that confusion may be partly shared by Burnham himself. Here is what I think it all means. The Triple Lock The Triple Lock is the way the UK state pension has been uprated every year for more than a decade, and it has led to pensions rising faster than earnings. Whatever you may think about this so far, it is clearly unsustainable in the long run without…

Zippy the cat scuttles up a tree and a few seconds later appears near the top. Not quite sure why here's there or how he got there. I know that feeling well, though you'll seldom find me stuck at the top of a tree. I'm glad that the cats have enough of La joie de vivre to pull this kind of thing off. Be a little more cat - but don't throw up fur balls onto your carpet.Pics by AG - using telephoto drone tech.

As often with Bulleid he utilised innovative construction techniques and materials; and his lightweight Diagram 3105 Luggage Van were no exception. The ten vans were built using reinforced plastic body panels for the sides, ends and roof attached to a lightweight welded body framing (the roof supports were laminated ash to give the required curvature. Whilst the vents were traditional light steel sheet. The body required to be mounted to the underframe via shock absorbing mounts to prevent any…

Two weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand any longer. Coding agents have gotten so good that it's simply not an economically viable enterprise going forward to have humans typing out lines of Ruby, Rust, or C++.When I polled the room for how many people were still writing a material amount of code by hand on a weekly basis, only a handful put up their hands. So they all knew this,…

A bad mist until near noon. Sun got through but not for long. Mopped the office out. Helped Gordon put rubbish on wagon. Brushed leaves off drive. No luck with flat.

Can't believe my last post was written before I started working. Employment sure makes time go both faster and slower at the same time. In the meantime, I have: found a team at work I actually enjoy working with get rid of my habit of taking the cab reduce doom-scrolling and turning to reading and Switch games instead finished 12 books in the month of September new AirPods 5 after using the wired EarPods for almost a year.

The best apps are ones that scratch your own itch, so let me tell you about my itch. Alongside my other wedding ventures I develop websites for a living and when I design and publish a website I am serving four masters: Me. Am I going to be proud enough of this website to put my name at the bottom? The client. Are they getting what they asked for? The client’s clients. Are they getting the experience they were hoping when they clicked that link? Other computers. Search engine crawlers, AI…