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…

Freaks! Freaks! Freaks! Developer: Scarab Publisher(s): Naxat Soft (Japan), Acclaim (US, PAL) Release Dates: June 2nd, 1995 (Japan), September 30th, 1996 (US), 1996 (PAL) Available On: Sega Saturn Genre: 2D Fighting I love me a cheesy as heck video game and I also enjoy fighting games a whole lot in general, so you’d think I would be a bigger fan of Mortal Kombat and the many similar games it inspired. Sometimes, a weird “clone” actually does work for me– I kinda like Ultra Vortek!– but most of…

omlahore/RemoveMacAI: Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back. One command, fully reversible. (via) Thanks for reading this post via RSS. You're awesome ♥️

On a clear day with blue skies on 26 August 1922, lightning struck the statue of Captain Myles Standish on the tower in Myles Standish Monument State Reservation in Duxbury, Massachusetts. The strange phenomenon destroyed the top half of the statue, and the arm holding his sword. Native Americans in the area considered this retribution, and gather at the legs annually. 70 years later, in the 1990s, the legs of this statue were discovered cast aside in a quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts. You can…

Breaking News from World’s End. The centre of nothing and the end of nowhere, much like Bedfordshire and Camberley. The motorised garden shed now has a motorised trailer car. Which is great, because now either can take turns in pulling the train to its banal destination. And in other news. The ukulele duo who meet most passenger trains (‘customers’ as we call them in these modern times) have been instructed to stand back so not to scare new arrivals, loco crews, badgers, bog frogs, twitchers…

I rescued this model from second hand purgatory. I didn’t really need it, per se, but I thought it might be useful for skills practice, pushing myself in my quest to apply larger scale details to these small N scale models… …that and the fact it was painted in Santa Fe - oh and it’s a GP20, the first ‘quality’ model I bought in the 90s was a Proto2000 HO scale example, more recently donating its chassis to the GP9RM project, but I digress…So inspired by the examples operating on the Napoleon…

I have a few Disneyland slides featuring this pretty lady in her colorful 1968 dress. We've seen her on the Matterhorn bobsleds, for instance. So, for a moment, I stared at this first photo trying to figure out just where in Disneyland she was standing. "HEY, wait a minute! She's in Knott's Berry Farm!". She's gazing down into the "Gold Mine", where people were panning for REAL GOLD. What the heck?Here she is with her friend, flirting with Handsome Brady and Whiskey Bill. They are both wearing…

Hercules (1995)

Letters from the turn of a century, 2Next in my series of three bits of Art Nouveau lettering is Albert House, a building in Manchester’s Bloom Street that once housed offices, although for what company or organization I’m not sure. It’s a building of brick and red sandstone, relieved by ornament in terracotta. Panels of terracotta decorated with stylised foliage and other curvaceous motifs sit beneath the windows. There are more very Art Nouveau curves in the metal grille on the double doors…

Over the past twelve years, I have been writing longer stories that form a distinct group, different to my earlier occult detective or antiquarian tales and to the pieces set in real or imagined European cities and provinces.These longer fictions are often located in particular English landscapes: in most cases the setting can be followed exactly on the map. They typically start from

Yesterday TfL's Chief Undertaker sounded the death knell for three more London buses, the 415, the C3 and the D7. RIP 415 The 415 was introduced in 2008 and runs between Tulse Hill and the Tesco on the Old Kent Road. It's shadowed by at least two other bus routes along every road it covers, so arguably superfluous. It will thus die, with the 333 extended from Elephant & Castle to the aforementioned Tesco to retain connections north of Brixton. South of Brixton bus frequency will drop by 30%…

What if Czechia had become part of the British Empire? Perhaps, like the United States, its map would now be dotted with towns and cities bearing familiar English place-names.There is actually no need to imagine this alternative historical timeline because Czengland is just such a map - a map of the Czech Republic with all the Czech place-names replaced with British equivalents. So Prague becomes London, Brno becomes Birmingham, and a whole host of Czech streets, districts, towns and landmarks…

This was mostly made for me to have a space to take note of what to change when doing the version bump for Noctalia on Linux. But putting it here in case it may help someone else as well!

Now there was a time when discovering where the barbel were hiding required proper reconnaissance. You might walk miles of riverbank, peer through bushes, speak to other anglers in hushed tones and, if you were particularly dedicated, actually go fishing and find out for yourself. Those were simpler times. Now, apparently, all you need is an internet connection and the ability to type “Warwickshire Avon barbel” into YouTube.Within seconds, the picture of the swim, the state of the river, the…

Like many young male gamers of a certain age, back in the day I did try playing the original Tomb Raider games a bit but never got particularly far or even enjoyed them really. This was back at the dawn of 3d gaming, and it would be another generation or two before camera controls would become good enough for me to log significant playtime in action games of this nature. In fact, I have never seen any of the Tomb Raider films either, so my knowledge of this franchise and its lore is limited to…

It's 152 years (to the day) since Sir Paweł Edmund Strzelecki died, in the fullness of his years, in London. He'd come a long way. He has been claimed as a Hero of Poland. In this case, quite literally as his remains were repatriated to Poznan in 1997 from Kensal Green Cemetery. Polish Wikipedia describes him as "geograf, podróżnik, badacz Australii" i.e. geographer, traveller [not tourist!] and Australian bad-ass. Poland surely vies with Ireland as being MOPE = Most Oppressed People Ever. We…

You can buy a faster bike. Deep section wheels, a tri bar, a helmet shaped like an egg, and you will go quicker on the same legs. You can buy carbon plated shoes and take minutes off a run. Even fitness is something you can buy, in a sense. Put in the hours, train hard, do the sessions, and the bike and the run give it back to you.Triathlon is full of this stuff, and to be fair most of it works. The bike is the obvious one. A set of wheels or a more aero position does part of the job for you,…

Fellow Automattician Job Thomas, down in Cape Town, South Africa, has a lovely story about using Claude and the Beeper MCP to wrangle all the group chats for his daughter’s sports.

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital…

Google acknowledging that some Android apps don’t run well on Intel Googlebooks is about what I’d expected. One of Android’s hidden catches is that Google has been neglecting it on Intel for a long time, and there isn’t a polished ARM-to-x86 translation layer to make up for it. The main reason the Lenovo Chromebook I tested had such a seamless Android app experience was its MediaTek processor, and I really think the best Googlebooks are going to be the ARM ones.

What to do with unacceptable tenants? The question how social housing providers should deal with those they believed would behave too badly to accommodate is a long-running and controversial one. Even to frame the question uncontroversially is difficult. That opening sentence focuses explicitly on behaviour but often it was the alleged character defects of potential tenants that were identified. Historically labels and categories have been more readily applied and everyday language, of course,…

What’s your favorite deep cut from an album? It’s 1977, I am 4 years old. Meanwhile, a band are recording their next, and sixth, album. Adjusting to a world of punk, still riding high after a tour featuring songs like Somebody to Love, Brighton Rock, and Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen headed back to the studio. During that Day at the Races tour, Queen started to realise they were on to something, they’d been annoyed by crowds singing along but, according to Brian May… “They sang every note of every…

Here’s a sentence I have been promising to write on this blog since at least March this year: Antarctica has been gaining ice since 2020. Not losing, gaining. Only 68 gigatonnes a year admittedly, actually a mere drop in the ocean, (or should that be crystal in the ice sheet?), given the vast size of the place, but an (almost) new paper that I worked on, led by the excellent Marlen Kolbe, explains why. From Kolbe et al., 2026 Black: Monthly cumulative GMB anomalies from April 2002 to December…

This is a PSA that I have deprecated the Simple RSS, Fanlistings, Blogs, and Askbox scripts. Ophanimkei's backend is transforming and changing, and while I did like my exploration into distributing PHP and SQL, I prefer making simpler PHP templates for public use and tinkering with my own more robust scripts privately. I also decided to reword some things in my PHP explanations, too. Previous readers admitted to me that a lot of the security stuff went over their heads, so I tried a bit harder…

The undeniable message of AdS/CFT is that, at least in this special snow globe, the rules of gravity and the rules of quantum mechanics are secretly describing the same game — despite the storied antagonism between the two theories. “Far from being opposed, they’re actually intertwined,” said Brian Swingle(opens a new tab), a physicist at Brandeis University. “One emerges from the other.” The correspondence came as a shock. I think of it as akin to discovering a way of converting any checkers…

Perfume PosseThe Time of Year Happy October. It’s still warm middle of day here but looks like that stops soon. I got my annual pumpkin. It’s actually a white ghost ornamental gourd so not edible. But, it’s lovely. This was a hard week post-wise. I… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseThe Time of Year

On our first weekend in Brazil we went to our family flat at Praia dos Carneiros. The beach is wonderful, still a bit wild, and we saw a ton of sea stars and even sea turtles! It was incredible to see, but very hard to photograph, there were a few turtles and they would just randomly peak their noses basically anywhere in a 100m stretch of beach. We also went snorkelling in Maragogi's coral reefs, where we saw a ton of beautiful fish. I had no camera on me. So here's a page of my sketchbook…

A rather nice Sunday it was in Stratford-upon-Avon, I must admit, with anglers seemingly emerging from every bush, hedge and suspiciously convenient patch of riverbank. The Rec was absolutely rammed with fishermen, and, even better, quite a few youngsters were amongst them always good to see the next generation getting their waders muddy.The water, unfortunately, was so clear you could probably have counted the scales on a gudgeon from the bridge, which isn't exactly ideal when you're trying to…