There is a moment in the assembly of a very expensive watch that no customer will ever witness, and that is rather the point of it. Anglage is the craft of bevelling the edges of a movement's components. A watchmaker takes a steel lever or a brass bridge, files a chamfer along its border at roughly 45 degrees, then polishes that narrow ribbon with wood and diamond paste until it throws light like a filament. On a good movement this takes hours. On a great one it takes days. And a meaningful…

Judge J. Campbell Barker (E.D. Tex.) issued two rulings involving SAD Scheme patent cases last week. The cases are: Shangyou Jiayi Lighting Product Co., Ltd. v. Schedule A Defendants, 2026 WL 2948520 (E.D. Tex. Sept. 30, 2026) and Haiying Liu v. Schedule A Defendants, 2026 WL 2948569 (E.D. Tex. Sept. 30, 2026) As per the new norm, these cases appear to be Chinese companies suing their Chinese competitors in US court. Another example of how rapidly the Chinese learn from U.S. (judicial)…

This was the book, self-published by Paul Lippman in 1992, that turned me into a maniac when I got hold of it in 1994. As soon as I saw the New Model Crandall on the cover, I was fascinated and hooked.It took about a decade for me to get hold of a New Model Crandall myself. It's a rough specimen, not functional, but still wonderful.In 2005, I got a notion that I could try to turn the typeface on its type cylinder into a digital font. I pulled out the cylinder, inked it, and rolled it carefully…

My hugo blog setup I use Hugo to build static HTML. Caddy serves the files from my Hetzner server, with Cloudflare in front. I describe the hosting and deployment in The Tech behind this Site. The site uses plain CSS and fonts already on your device. Hugo minifies the CSS and JavaScript and changes their filenames when the contents change. I cache these files for a year. After an update, your browser requests the new filename. One script handles the menu, theme switch and image viewer. It loads…

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

It is now or never. If you don't make it, you've lost again. Game over man. Start again from level 1.

Indeed with a lack of real words to rhyme with ninth, needing to keep the patterns for this year’s posts, I resorted to a chap who just cheerfully makes stuff up to define “grinth” as “the peculiar little feeling of having noticed something nobody else did.” Clever? More importantly after last month thrashing through a three month catch up on the daily photo summaries for September I am on target, or relatively near it having filled up by October 2 making sure that on September 30, the 273rd…

New York City in 1980 had a look that can be surprisingly difficult to picture today. The buildings are familiar, the streets are recognizable, and the crowds move with the same hurried energy, yet the details belong unmistakably to another time. Cars from another generation line the curbs, shop signs have different names, and people […]

In For All Mankind, the Soviets reach the Moon first and NASA keeps the cameras. Noiseless started in 2024 because the official Elasticsearch gem refuses to talk to OpenSearch. Basecamp shipped its Active Search in 2026.

5th October 2026 How the club’s lack of cooperation and putting forward dishonest evidence have put the club at a disadvantage * This is a post is on the decision by an independent commission on Manchester City. In particular, this post critically examines two passages: (1) the conclusion that that certain factual witnesses for Manchester City gave evidence at the hearing that they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest (at paragraph 29(b) of the decision); and (2) the finding that…

Mouser - As Thief with HP growths one level behind. Cat ears: Listen at doors +1 Rodent enmity: Attacks against rodentine creatures +2

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantasy as a genre over the years: How do you think the fantasy genre has changed over the years? Is there a particular time period of fantasy writing that you particularly enjoy? I have a pretty good knowledge of some genres/eras within certain genres because I studied them, so I’m a bit scared of this question: it’s not really my area at all! I haven’t…

I'm several days behind schedule, but I did read a book or two in September. A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon - Kevin Fedarko This is an epic of a travel diary written by a National Geographic reporter. Walking the length of the Grand Canyon - a rare accomplishment measured in just a few dozen people - seemed like something he and his colleague Pete could do given that they've been to the extremes of the world already, but it whipped them,…

I saw this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble in the “Travel” section. Thrilling Cities was a travelogue written by Ian Fleming in 1963.He had been writing the Bond novels for a decade and the films had just become very popular. The Sunday Times flew Fleming around the world to visit 13 cities to write about them and play off the popularity of James Bond.The Wikipedia page has very detailed history of the book and Fleming’s travels (which he reportedly hated).

https://insitze.com/blog-posts/ fresco fiasco Released on 10/01/26. Cover art links to all available platforms. Best heard in over-ear headphones via Subvert.fm. This post contains the official hand-typed liner notes for “fresco fiasco” by Alex Sitze, dipping into the details of the song’s production, lyrics, philosophy and credits. Questions and discussion are welcome in the comments section. • More liner notes…Here• Hyperlink Turnpike…Here Gallery: • Background• Foreground • Lyrics• Palette•…

Yipee!! I'm really liking the order that I have been playing for each path - I am still in part 1, just started the 4th path. I don't have much to say but I had originally got the switch when FE:3H came out (where I've spent 300+ hours) so I'm not surprised that I bought a switch 2 for this one lol. I am having a really good time, but working very hard to avoid spoilers/outside reviews so I'll post my full review never!!! Other than I love Fabio (for his weird ass personality) and how I (IRL…

Archaeologists in Brazil say they have unearthed 25,000- to 27,000-year-old pendants made of bony material from the extinct giant ground sloth A better video? More. I am not sure how resolved this is but it is interesting. I saw it before but apparently didn’t post it.

https://joshtronic.com/2026/10/04/confessions-domain-hoarder/ I relate to this. I don't hoard domains for web projects per se, more like personal projects that ran their course to various degrees (like, the band broke up, I lost interest in making deep house, I didn't really want to work on a mobile app, our reading group stopped meeting, etc). Yep, I also spite-kept a couple domains that I had the foresight to register on behalf of -- and subsequently strongly believed should not belong to --…

My textbook has a feature in every chapter: Dirty Data Alerts. It warns students about ways that data can be manipulated without straight-up lying. I have one Dirty Data Alert dedicated to manipulated y-axes. Like, truncated y-axes. Because that is the way you manipulate a y-axis, right? RIGHT?! Oh, no, there is a new way to manipulate them without lying. Check out this example, pointed out by @SarahStarberry.Here, the y-axis measures the version number. That's all. Not how good the tool is, or…

What the Witch Left by Ruth Chew, 1973, 2013. Katy and her friend Louise are bored one day at Katy’s house. They start snooping around a drawer that contains things that Katy’s Aunt Martha left behind after her last visit, even though Katy’s mother told her not to mess with them. At first, they seem pretty ordinary. There’s a pair of boots, a bathrobe with a pretty design, a pair of flesh-colored gloves, and a mirror. Katy tries on the pair of gloves, but to her surprise, they fit so well that…

We made it! Truth is it wasn't that bad, MsBubba might disagree but it wasn't that bad. Are we booked to camp host on the Oregon coast next summer? You bet. With Diesel over $6 USD a gal on the coast even up to $10 a gal. it could be hard to justify, we will see.I have a new toy from Vivosun called "VSeed Smart Seeding Box". VSpeed link.There are 8 beans in it as I type. It should take 'em from seed to planting with no input from me. I question doing a indoor grow this year. I've always been…

Git is used everywhere in software development. And this very blog is also stored in Git. Obviously, I use Git a lot. I even have a regularly updated blog post with various tips and tricks. Git uses SHA-1 hashes to address contents it stores. The most important word in this sentence is address. Cause the aformentioned hash is not intended to provide security or verification. The upcoming Git 3.0 is going to switch the default for commit hashes from SHA-1 to SHA-256, the newer more secure…

The baseball season is over for my beloved Chicago Cubs, who suffered ignominious defeat in an NL Wild Card series against San Diego. I’ll be honest: it got to me a little, to have the season end that way. I had been daydreaming about Pete Crow-Armstrong delivering something memorable in the playoffs, to cap a pretty ridiculous MVP run in the regular season. I guess that’ll have to wait until next year. My malaise was helped a little by the news that a new Chad Harbach novel is arriving soon.…

For any subculture or community - say, rationality, or raving, or crossfit, or social justice advocacy, or open source software, there are people who were once very devout members, but are now jaded haters. I think what's happening is that originally the community was so good for them that it hurt for them to consider that any part of it could be bad or toxic or harmful. Then, they were themselves hurt by one of the toxic elements, and there was some sort of sign flip, and suddenly it hurt for…

M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics In this artist’s conception, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is surrounded by a hot disk of accreting material. Blue lines trace magnetic fields. Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the Universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce is through the material surrounding them. Superheated plasma of their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields. But there is a more…

“Fisher King” and “Coddled Affluent Professional” are unimpressed by the intellectual caliber of Ivy League grads: I spent a large amount of my life among the well-educated who attended the ivies. I have less contact with them today – and I don’t notice any loss at all. That is a group of strivers and box checkers – it is not generally a group of intellectually curious people today. https://t.co/MYSRMJDD7R — FischerKing (@FischerKing64) October 4, 2026 I’ve been around people who went to top…

Since moving to Zola as my static site generator, I have had a nice setup for my website. However, a recent update to zola (v0.22 -> v0.23) broke my website (had something to do with the Tera templating engine that zola uses. This provided an incentive to move to a more stable solution. My ultimate goal has always been to build this website purely with emacs and orgmode[1], and I'm glad now that's the case. Full disclosure however, I did take the help of LLMs to implement this over the weekend.…

Benchmark In Milliseconds Oct 5, 2026 How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons: Milliseconds are integers ranging from 1 to 999. Enough precision to notice even a small improvement, and easy to scan visually. No need for different units or floating points (compare 1.31s with 239ms). Anything faster than, say, 10ms risks being skewed by fixed costs (e.g, interpreter startup). Hundreds of…

Tupo is my first new game in four years. I'm excited to share it with the world, and to talk about the process behind it.