The RNLI aren’t traitors; they’re heroes. There is a racism and cohesion crisis in Britain. Britain knew about the Holocaust as it happened. Generations of monarchs were central to Britain’s slave trade. The British government makes five billion pounds a year from immigration fees. The Home Office threw some EU residents’ settled status into doubt because it misinterpreted Italian citizenship law. Slovenia in 1992 showed “remigration” in action. Donald Tusk warns of Russian drone and rocket…

Before you read this, I suggest you read posts 16.12 and 26.7. I introduced the concept of time in post 16.12. However, the special theory of relativity leads to an unexpected property of time – it depends on the state of motion of an observer; time does not pass equally in different inertial frames of reference. The more quickly you move, the slower time passes. We don’t normally notice this effect because it only becomes appreciable at speeds that are comparable to the speed of light in a…

What is this?A weekly note on what I've been up to. Last week's is here.tldrLast day at NHS England, then straight to Cambridge for a conference and a Hepworth on the lawn. Four rehab runs, 9.1km short of 1,000km for the year. Town lose at home to Shrewsbury.FinishingTuesday was my last day working with create/change at NHS England. The sheer number of extra hours we put in towards the end made it feel like a relegation battle. We was staying up heading into the last game of the season but just…

After my recent post about how Apple Maps butchers the Great American Pyramid, several readers sent in images of other pyramids Apple has rendered properly. One in particular is quite painful to see — Luxor Las Vegas. Here is a the hotel in satellite view, and then in Apple’s 3D rendered view: It seems that Apple does have the technology to make smooth pyramids!

I just ordered a bunch of leftist patches to put on my backpack, because virtue signaling is good, actually. One patch I kept seeing over and over again is… No human is illegal on stolen land. I get it. It’s supposed to point out the hypocrisy of complaining about illegal immigration in a country that was founded by stealing it from and genociding the people who already lived here. But it also kind of implies that if we hadn’t done that—if we’d found an empty continent just waiting to be…

From Mike Posner’s weekly newsletter: Am I eating the right food? Have I eaten too much? Have I checked my WHOOP HRV status in the last 30 minutes? Am I taking the right supplements? Should I be adding peptides? Am I doing too much cold plunge or too little? It’s as if the primary question of this generation is, “Am I doing it right?” It’s exhausting. Often I can trick myself into believing that the happiness and fulfillment I long for is still one biohack away. But here’s a revolutionary idea…

I spent a non-trivial amount of time designing items for Fabula last weekend. Awarding interesting treasure is consistently one of, if not the, most frustrating part of running a Fabula campaign. Each session you are expected to handout a fixed amount of treasure, but the cost for any given item, especially at the start of a campaign, is frequently limited to the point all that treasure feels the same and doesn't excite anyone. I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this, either - the GM for…

The Onion’s Voting Simulator is characteristically subversive and funny. Go play it now.

[Rex Chapman logged a solid 12-year NBA career that spiraled off by the end into what would become self-destructive battles with addiction. It’s all detailed in Chapman’s excellent book titled It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me: A Memoir, published in 2024 and well-written by the prolific Seth Davis. (He’s now teamed with Larry Brown on his memoir, due out in March 2027). The following clip, pulled from the December 1996 issue of the Phoenix Suns magazine called Fastbreak, doesn’t delve into any…

Life’s been stressful lately, and I’m feeling the wear and tear. So I’m going to write about something easy and peaceful and fun: I’ve been thoroughly happy with pico.sh pages since moving my blog a couple months ago. One thing I dislike about deploying with Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and the like is having to spin up an entire deployment pipeline for what might be a one-word edit. This is where a CMS wins by a mile. (And maybe I just shouldn’t care because in the scheme of things this sort of…

Local news site The Edinburgh Minute ran its best ever headline a few weeks ago, the kind where you have to find out what’s going on: “Dance music event axed over emu attack fears”. Turns out that a Cold War bunker in the city’s northwest is home to two angry Aussie birds. As well as angry birds of its own, Bolivia is home to the first new cat species identified by science in a century. Leopardus tilcayo was known to indigenous Bolivians all along, of course. I wonder if Cecil saw one during…

In a kitchen drawer, between a key that fitted no door and a knot of charging cables, lay an iPhone 6s. It had once been the newest phone in the house, and it had taken more pictures of the cat than anyone would ever look at. Then one Christmas a bigger phone arrived, the old one went into the drawer “for now,” and for now lasted nine years. “We are retired, you and I,” said the key. “I am resting,” said the iPhone. One evening a hand took it out, plugged it in and installed NAS Reborn. It…

On Friday I sat in on How People Work, Live!, Dan Hon's regular live show, a spin off from his workshop of the same name.Basic premise: how well you work with other people matters as much as how good you are at the work.This time Dan was talking with Hillary Hartley, formerly of 18F and Ontario's first chief digital officer.It was live from 5pm BST on Friday, so I didn't have the energy to write full notes. Instead – ahem – here's some things that caught my attention from Dan and Hillary's…

As it was foretold, members of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) held a one-hour stoppage on Maynooth University campus today to mark World Teachers’ Day. The turnout was very good, helped by the reasonably nice weather. As well as speeches from members of IFUT, there were also contributions from the other Unions, Unite and Siptu as well as the Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation; the latter is not an officially-recognised trade union, but supports the dispute. The next action…

I am super pleased to announce that my new book is in dock! Well, I hope so, anyway. You can’t launch unless you are in harbour, after all, and I have had some trouble getting it distributed. As regular readers … Continue reading →

Aloha! It’s been 16 weeks since my last update. A lot has happened in my life recently, so I didn’t feel the need to write about it. But I am alive!!Actually, I haven’t been on my computer or laptop at all, which is where I write my posts, among other things. I somehow disconnected myself, well, not entirely, since I still use my phone to keep in contact with people.But in the last two weeks, I have been practicing a lot of self-care, finding my peace, and taking a lot of rest. I had booked…

Back home, it’s just “the river.” I was born about a mile from its sandbar banks in Dardanelle, Arkansas, and I’ve never lived anywhere that’s more than a 30-minute drive from watching tugboats muscle massive barges through Dardanelle Lock. The river is where we baked in the August afternoon sun while setting up camp and woke to a sopping wet sauna the next morning. It’s where scuba divers brushed up against catfish “big as cars,” or at least that’s what the old-timers at the bait shop told me.

At the time of posting, these domain names were all available. All links are to my domain name registration site. imadethis.social (I made this social) This would be good for a community of makers showing off what they made. It would also work for a community where the focus is that you and I, as participants, make this place social. now2b.social (now to be social) A more generic domain that is fun, rather short, and reasonably easy to remember. I can imagine this s a community for shy people…

It’s been thirty years since Amon Tobin released Adventures in Foam under the Cujo moniker. He returns to form with Paranova, his latest Cujo release, and it’s a splendid album (upon first listen). Let’s see if it holds up for another thirty years.

In today’s episode, I read Emily Brontë's Poem LVI. Source

I have a thing for lamps. Especially designer lamps from the past. I occasionally share them on X and Instagram, and people always ask me about the brands and models. I love lamps so much that I designed one myself. So I decided to give a tour of the lamps I own.Before I go into each one, I should say that none of these are cheap. Are they worth it? Probably not for their price, but for me they are worth every penny. At a certain point, it becomes more like collecting, and collecting things is…

While I’m not a fan of the hard-boiled detective genre, I recently obtained West of Guam: The Complete Cases of Jo Gar by Raoul Whitfield (1896–1945). This reprints a series starring “Island detective” Jo Gar. He is a Spanish-Filipino living in Manila who is a former policeman, now a private investigator who often gets involved […]

I previously mentioned that we’re selling our 2017 Tiffin Allegro Bus 40SP motorhome. Which of course leads to the question, what next? Are we still doing the RV lifestyle? If so, what kind of RV will we be getting?Since moving out of the Tiffin, we’ve been living at our official domicile, Mom’s house in Washington, and have done a bunch of redecorating and nesting.We have also booked four months (December through March) in a vacation tiny home in Orlando, Florida. We plan to get Disney World…

I recently went back to my old hometown of Jacksonville, IL, to visit my mom and dad. My dad is 96 and will be 97 in just under two months. He is doing pretty well, if you ask me. But this was also my first trip back to Jacksonville since my Jackson project had taken full steam.Jacksonville of 2026 is not the same as Jacksonville of 1986. And neither is the same as Jackson, IL, of 1986. But if you look hard enough, you will see the similarities.The past is a foreign country; they do things…

Mac OS/X, or “macOS” as Apple would like me to stylize it but that ain’t happening, is based on a number of prior OSes: NwXTSTEP, OpenBSD, and a kind of intermediate step after OpenBSD called Darwin. When OS/X was new Apple made much hay out of Darwin being open source. Was it ever really, completely? Once it may have been, but it’s said that gradually that’s become less and less true. It’s certainly not been super viable as its own thing for a while, needing some important parts, particularly…

On our way south from the Salmon Galcier, our spirits were high. There were two reasons for this: first, we were headed to Telkwa Pass, and unlike our first visit with fog and cloudy skies, it was a blue bird day. Second - and I assure you, just as importantly - we'd overridden Google Maps suggestion and found a 4-miles-longer route back to Terrace, BC that was paved; we wouldn't have to suffer through the swiss-cheese-road we'd endured on the way north! We arrived in Terrace at almost the…

We keep reading scary reports of swarms of AI agents breaking into computer systems and doing other untoward and perhaps illegal things. To what degree do these agents influence each other? And is there anything we can learn from human behavior that would help mitigate these problems? That’s the heady backstory behind [episode 46](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology) of [_Traction Heroes_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/). Harry brought a short reading…

The second of two Maggi varieties found at a local supermarket. Really happy to see this – hoping they come out with more Maggi for the US market! Let’s give it a try. Maggi Korean Spicy BBQ Noodles – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, add noodles and sachet contents to 1 cup boiling water and simmer 3 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! An individual package from the multipack. Detail of the packaging (click to…

I’ve still got all my WordPress sites on Pressable and happily so; I think they do a good job! They do everything you’d expect a WordPress host to do. The things I specifically like are: Customer support is good/fast, including free movement of sites Deploying from a GitHub repo is a first-class citizen Perfectly good DNS management No need for extra security, performance, or update plugins Things are generally with-the-grain of the WordPress ecosystem On that last point, I appreciated this…

A message of appreciation after attending DjangoCPH 2026 as a speaker. Last week, I had the joy of presenting at DjangoCPH (Django Danmark's annual conference in Copenhagen) for the third time. While big conferences are often the norm, DjangoCPH is a rather cute and small one, with around 60 people in the room and more online. And honestly, I love it. It's like spending the day in a cozy living room with friends, talking shop about shared passions, and then still enjoying each other's presence…