While cleaning up my resumé for my current job search, I noticed one single link was no longer working. The offender was a blog I wrote almost 400 posts for, a few years back. This blog, Pplware Kids, was a branch of Pplware, a Portuguese tech blog. There, I wrote many explainer posts, tutorials, and tech news. Now, it is gone. If you try accessing the blog, it just redirects to the main blog. Since they were redirecting the URL paths, I thought they had imported the blog posts into the main…

Megalodon had the teeth to make a meal of a whale. Fossils show that it did—but the menu was more varied than a succession of enormous animals. They ate their fill of what was swimming in the ocean around them. Small whales, other marine mammals and perhaps other sharks all enter the story. To investigate what Otodus megalodon ate, we can follow bite marks on bones and chemical signals

In the Newsletter this weekElsewhere this week: Video about Madrid - LisboaAnalysis: Timetable Change 2027 Part 2: new servicesBullshit Meter: Le Train to run anything, ever with Talgo AvrilAstounding week: France and Germany get the cross border Régiolis trains running on ONE WHOLE LINEGood week: Hitachi wins a contract for Eurocaravaggio trains in GermanyAlso a good week: Works to introduce battery electric trains in north eastern Czechia proceedBad week: GoVolta becomes StopVolta, and Dutch…

Reading the comments on my post on junk I was surprised to see the extent to which people's relation to rarely used possessions varies. Some people forget rarely used possessions, and get minimal benefit from having them stored. When they need something, they don't know whether they already have it, and the effort to maintain an index [1] wouldn't be worth it. Ben writes: I end up with curtains I don't need. I decide to store them for the future in case they are helpful. Years pass. I need new…

There was a rather bizarre long read in Railway Gazette this week about French startup Le Train. Lest we forget that they are currently sans trains, as the Talgo Avril trains they sort of agreed to buy in 2023 are not approved to run in France yet, and Renfe (whose series 106 fleet is the same design) gave up trying.One presumes Le Train's investors do not want to put any money into the venture until they know the trains are approved to run in France, so a contract between Le Train and Talgo…

log why not i decided to add a page about things i don’t do, don’t support, or try to avoid it is by no means complete, and i will try to add more entries as time goes on there is also the possibility that i will remove it in the future, since i believe it is better to focus on useful things but it might help someone else feel less alone in choosing not to do certain things let me know what you think via email

PHP 8.5 has brought us features such as the pipe operator, array_first(), array_last(), the URI extension, and the #[\NoDiscard] attribute. PHP 8.6 is shaping up to be another interesting release. It contains a mix of language improvements, new standard-library functions, better networking APIs, security improvements, and a few useful internal optimizations. It’s general availability is currently scheduled for November 19, 2026. So, it’s a good time to look at everything that has made it into…

got luckyI went searching for something to soak the compass plane in and found this. I know I have some clear plastic bins somewhere but they are AWOL. I filled it with water and dumped in some Simple Green Concentrate. I'll check it in a couple of days.no Simple GreenI don't want to soak this at all. I am leery about the attachment points of the steel sole. I am not willing to chance the Simple Green loosening something up there. I will scrape the two outside faces and repaint them. I will…

I recently read Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. Multiple friends had recommended it, and it turned out to be a genuinely thought-provoking read. Three lessons stayed with me most. First, the most important thing we do in this life is collect memories. It’s easy to slide into the default of accumulating money and forget that money is a means vs. the point. Experiences pay dividends the way invested money does. Learning to live well means learning to strike the balance between saving and spending…

Stephan MicusTraces in the Sand Stephan Micus hang, kalimba, shakuhachi, duduk, Indian crane flutes, sapeh, Bavarian zither, bodhran, genbri, dilruba, shō, chord zitherRecorded 2023-25 at MCM StudiosCover: Sara MicusAn ECM ProductionRelease date: November 13, 2026 At the edge of the sea, Stephan Micus lets the horizon undo the small enclosure of composition. Months spent on a few minutes of music require a concentration that his almost daily swims in Mallorca open outward again, returning the…

A website is like a little piece of real estate on the website – a place for your digital life to have a home (complete with its own address!). I’ve hosted a personal blog since 2008, and a photo blog almost as long. My blog has lived on a few platforms, like Blogspot and Tumblr, […]

There has been a dramatic fall in the amount of interpersonal violence in most countries. I don't want to go too Freakanomics and, obviously, correlation is not causation but perhaps video games have a role to play in this? A teenager being cooped up in their room means less exposure to situations where hormonal impertinence is likely to cause a violent reaction. Shouting and screaming at people via a headset rarely leads to real-life consequences. Beating up street-fighters is less risky than…

Another Martin Scarsden story, although this one is told from multiple points of view – primarily Martin and another author known as Ecco. There’s a bomb at a book launch which causes Mandy and Liam to be bundled off to Hawaii and Martin himself to seek sanctuary in the deep outback. He soon gets mixed up in a long-standing family feud and in addition to his own problems helps Ecco solve a complex murder/disappearance from 20 years previous, likely based on tracing journal entries from the late…

The other day I had to order my thyroid pills go get delivered. Sure I could have stopped by and picked them up when we were driving past but I ahve gotten so used to not doing that I get them mailed. I do not drive being visually impaired so I just don’t like to ask anyone for anything unless I need it. I have not checked the website on the computer recently but several years ago they made that so incredibly broken and at one point i think they even forced one to use the app for orders. The…

Using Stripe data across about 181,000 subscription businesses, Mack Grenfell argues the SaaS slowdown became visible in October, when median revenue growth turned negative across most peer groups. He suggests the bigger problem is fewer new signups, likely driven by AI-fueled competition rather than customer churn. Read more

A couple of pics from my last trip to Japan.

From Wikipedia TESCREAL is a neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres. An acronym, it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalism (denoting the ideology of the rationalist community), Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins.[1] They claim these constitute a movement that allows its…

link here you have to create an account to read this but it is free. Thank you again to Northern Spy

Hi, welcome to this write-up for the 6. Fully Stocked challenge from Bellingcat. Here you can see my thought processes and what steps I took to get to the answer, but of course there are many different ways of reaching the same results. First lookBellingcat has posted an image of a container vessel in a port. Our task is to find out in which city this particular port is located. Thinking of how to go about it, I noted in the picture: Several ships are visible, one even has readable text on it…

My notes from this year’s GovCamp Cymru unconference in Cardiff. Use the Welsh you have Heledd and Jo welcomed everyone and set things up for the day. One of the slides encouraged people to "use the Welsh you have". I thought this was a nice way to encourage everyone to try a few phrases, like "bore da" (Good morning) or "Benjy dw i" (I'm Benjy). As a Welsh person who doesn't speak Welsh, I always get nervous using Welsh around native speakers. So seeing this early on definitely made me feel…

It’s time for another rendition of Ask Mister Language Person, in which the world’s foremost leading authority on grammar as well as basically everything else answers questions submitted by readers exactly like you, except that you physically exist.We begin today with a question that Mister Language Person is frequently asked by modern youths:Q. Why should we modern youths bother to learn about grammar? We have Artificial Intelligence! It does our reading and writing for us! In fact AI is…

Is Dominica worth visiting? After six challenging days on the island, my honest answer is: only for a certain kind of traveler. My husband Charlie and I visited Dominica in December 2025, and it was the toughest stop by far on our four-week trip across the Caribbean. We dealt with some of the worst roads I’ve ever experienced, nearly constant rain, and a horrible last night spent searching for food near the airport. Part of the problem was our expectations. Almost everything I’d read about…

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where we're all full of brotherly love!Watch out for the Fresno Nightcrawler!The ghosts of Newcastle.A pioneering architect.A mysterious scandal.A bloody poltergeist.The great medieval famine.The actress who was arrested for the way she rode a horse.Extrajudicial witch hunts.The Maya woman who was given a whole lot of teeth.Medieval ways of keeping warm.The 19th century Paris "season."A tribute to "Gulliver's Travels."Remembering an "ordinary" death from over…

I was driving down a country highway on the 25th of October, in the late afternoon sun. One of the better things to do when driving is a bit of drive-by botany. Honestly it's hard to ignore for me. I couldn't help but notice that all the new River Red Gums recruits appeared to be dead or dying. When I use the term 'recruits', its a shortening for the word 'recruitment'. And recruitment in this context is the process by which new individuals of a particular plant species are added to an existing…

— Thanks for joining me here during my social media sabbatical month. I’m pre-posting some best-ofs etc this month as well as some thematic posts drawing on a richness that is 10 years of blogging in this space. — Today’s theme is happiness. And I admit, I’m surprised by how many posts on Transactions with Beauty show up in a search for the word happiness. — I’m still taken with the phrase taken from Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark: “the synonyms of happiness.” — And I love the word eudaimonia,…

Today I went to a coffee shop that serves only filter coffee. Unlike many other cafes in Korea, it has neither desserts nor Americanos. Every time I visit this coffee shop, I wonder how many times the owner has had to answer some version of the question, "Do you have Americanos?" As I sipped my coffee and watched my wife pat our sleeping baby's back in a baby carrier, I saw three middle-aged women enter the shop. "Please respect other guests in this space. We ask everyone to refrain from loud…

BOUGHT: Dracula Book Three: The Count (Dark Horse Books) In some ways, the third volume of Matt Wagner, Kelley Jones and Jose Villarrubia's Dracula series is the most interesting. That's because it is devoted to the character's time in London in the late 19th century and thus covers the time of the "real", original Dracula story, that told in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel...and retold over and over again in what now seems like countless adaptations. How then would they differentiate their telling of…

It has become difficult to recommend TV shows in this era of scattering across more streaming services than anyone can afford, as New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote this week. However: Michelle and Robert King, the masterminds behind The Good Wife , are back with Cupertino. The show is actually appearing on legacy US broadcast network CBS. That means those in the US who have real TVs and antennas can watch the show for free, albeit swamped in ads, though they may have to explain to…

One of the outgrowths of spending so much time studying the history of building technology is that I’ve spent a lot of time studying horrible tragedies. Building collapses and fires, and the resulting deaths, injuries, and monetary losses, have traditionally spurred new ideas in design and construction. Some of those ideas have been terrible and quickly abandoned, and some are still with us today. While I was in Indianapolis last week for the APT conference, I saw this sign which mostly speaks…

This is what you see when you arrive at Buchanan's Store. I enjoy photographing these old,historical places as a way of preserving history. One day these stores will all be gone and replacedby corporate convenience stores. All images were made using an OM-1 Mark II and OM 8-25mm f/4 Pro lens. ISOs ranged from 200 to 12,800. (click to enlarge)A few weeks ago, I happened to catch a short story shown by the North Carolina Public Broadcasting System on an old country store located in north central…