Some experiments with alternate DNS system Yesterday Badri asked on CoDeMa: What do you think of setting up OpenNIC based DNS lookups on servers hosting FSCI operated services? It prompted me to try out opennic myself. The thread actually links to FSCI’s guide to using OpenNIC on android. For my computer though, I used the opennic-up script that I discovered from OpenNIC Wiki. (It is available on AUR). With that set up, I was able to browse through some listed sites like be.libre. Registering…

Lunch this particular Saturday started on a bit of a sad note. To get to the restaurant from Shaftesbury Avenue requires walking past the site of 10 Greek Street, once one of the most reliable restaurants in Soho, now sadly empty and forlorn. I know, it's 2026, lots of places are struggling and restaurants open and close all the time but I though 10 Greek Street would be there forever, a kind of Soho stalwart bistro like Duck Soup or Antidote Wine Bar or Noble Rot, always available for a glass…

In the fall of 2014, writer Paul Ford was a couple drinks in and reading a 2004 Thanksgiving letter Stevie Nicks posted online, addressed "Dear all Armed Forces Members~" (it's still up, and a great read). Ford was perplexed by all the tildes she sprinkled throughout her writing. His wife Mo, who grew up in California, told him "that's a west coast thing... it's more like handwriting." If you asked me, I'd tell you that a tilde at the end of a sentence in informal online communication is…

My notes for the French code de la route, part 2: child seats, seatbelt fines, and what ABS, ESP, ASR, AFU and other driving aids actually do. Read the full post on the blog.

Yesterday Mrs N and I attended another talk (it was 'Enlighten' weekend in Lichfield, a series of events aimed at making us once again a 'city of philosophers'). The talk was by biographer and self-confessed journalist Anne Sebba, and the subject was her recent book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that, at some time after the programme for the weekend was printed, the time for this talk had been brought forward by half an hour, so we missed the first half.…

ready to do battleThe front one with the X is the corkscrew board I couldn't flatten yesterday. Before I expended any more calories on that one, I checked the back one which I had gotten flat and twist free.sighIt moved a wee bit over night. Not much but more than I could ignore. I'll let it relax and I'll deal with it after I finish the hissy fit throwing board.2nd boardI wasn't surprised that this board still had a healthy amount of twist shaking hands with me. Houston, WTF???This board…

A couple of posts back I walked through the agent and tools we built on top of the Laravel AI SDK for There There, the helpdesk we're putting together at Spatie. I ended that post on a small cliffhanger. We hand the agent off to a streaming service that turns the SDK's response stream into events the frontend can consume. That's this post. A quick reminder on our angle. After two decades of running our own customer support, we wanted a helpdesk where AI makes support agents faster, not one that…

Architectural detail of the Populus Hotel in Denver, Colorado.Architectural detail of the Populus Hotel in Denver, Colorado. The post Cheese Grater? appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Carried by StormMay Agnes FlemingNew York: Carleton, 1880400 pagesThe first sentence holds a promise of things supernatural:Miss Ventnor is Olga Ventnor, fairest of all the beautiful women in Carried by Storm. The house, known as "the red farm-house," is just one of many rentals on John Abbott's vast estate. His home, "Abbott Wood," is far more lavish:A grand Elizabethan manor, with turrets, and peaked gables, and quaint, vine-clad stone porches, and painted windows, with stone mullions. It is…

Game title: Control Resonant Plaform: pc Rating: 4.25/5 What a game. Some of these visuals were insane. I'm a big fan of the Remedyverse and inhale everything that moves the overarching plot forward. Control Resonant does so, but not quite in the ways I hoped for. Instead, it expands on Control's lore and the backstory of Jesse and Dylan. And do I have theories now. The gameplay is vastly different from the first game, and I don't know yet which one I prefer (it's also been too long since I…

I was a bit awestruck by the facility. Above my chair, the dentist’s workstation had a computer screen where he could carefully monitor my root canal, using a small camera that he occasionally positioned beside my mouth. He was repairing the mistake made during my last visit to my dentist in New Jersey, and the facility today was such an upgrade. Instead of requiring multiple visits to the dentist, he would complete the entire procedure — including making and fitting the highest-grade zirconia…

My assessment of the current state of COVID-19 and why I still wear a mask in public spaces

I have had a good week-end, good in ways both expected and unexpected. I began the week-end by driving down to Columbia, SC to meet up with my parents so we could go to the James R. Crumley Archive banquet together. In past years, I had seen people post pictures of the banquet, and I always thought it sounded interesting, the kind of event I would be sure to attend if I lived nearby.I've lived nearby for several years, but this was the first year I could go. Past years had seminary classes,…

In April 1856, Patrick McGlynn, a school teacher in Beagh, a very small village in the isolated far west of Donegal, wrote a letter. It was a letter that would precipitate dramatic events for the locals. It was also a letter that meant McGlynn scabbed and betrayed many of lower class people in his region. It arrived with Daniel Cruise, the local magistrate, and in it contained an offer that, in

It's October once again, and that means it is time to take the new release of Python for a spin. As I did with my Python 3.14 performance article of a year ago, today I'm sharing a new run of my informal Python benchmark, comparing Python 3.15 against previous interpreters all the way back to 3.10. If you are not interested in the charts and the tables and just want to read my analysis, feel free to jump to the conclusions section at the end.

Loop unrolling is complexicated. Usual knowledge is that the compiler has way more knowledge than you might have about source code and the target machine, and so you should just write a loop, and let the compiler decide what to actually do with it. This is a good rule of thumb, most of the time. The other day I made one GPU compute shader in Blender 10 times (ten times!) faster by unrolling a loop though.

LanguageTool has certainly served me very well over the years. The price is reasonable too and has been worth every penny I have spent on it. I have been thinking about moving on to Harper for my grammar checking though. The program has an LSP server but it doesn’t seem to play well with Kate. At least not for my use case. Recently I have also noticed that LanguageTool seems to be missing quite a bit and seems to be slower to check the text. Another issue is it requires me to have an internet…

I love spending 10 minutes trying to find my notebook somewhere amoungt my bags and by the time I do I've forgotten what I needed to write down.

We’ve just got back from a week in Cadiz. We loved it. It is a city at the end of a piece of land, surrounded by water, all bleached and peeling, looking out onto the Atlantic. It is old in the way that some people are old: not particularly interested in hiding it. The buildings are faded and the streets narrow. Laundry hangs from balconies, shutters sag, bars are dark and busy. It is a functional, working port city not unlike Palermo. There is something wonderfully uncurated about it. A…

The way people of later times view a dark age is…not at all the same as the way people living in such an age view it. – “Nightfall” If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live in a dark age, wonder no more; you are in one now, at least the early part of one. As I wrote last year, …a dark age is one lacking reliable records, so historians cannot be certain of what actually happened. Of course, censorship is typically part of that; if a government or religion burns books, anything…

Last time, I reviewed the splendid novella "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by "Kelley Roos," a shared penname of William and Audrey Roos, which finds their normally bantering, wisecracking mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy during a messy breakup – only for a murder to bring them back together. A humorously written, deftly-plotted and clued novella. Its only negative is its short length that left me wanting a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy outing, but have already reread The Frightened…

Eddie Powell as the mummified Ra.Five years after Hammer Films' The Mummy did solid business at the box office, the studio mounted a sequel: the blandly-titled Curse of the Mummy's Tomb. Without Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, this new Mummy was relegated to the second half of a double bill with The Gorgon. It's a lesser Hammer production, to be sure, but still solid fare for the undiscerning horror film fan.In 1900, a trio of British archaeologists discover and plunder the tomb of Egyptian…

Who else hates marketing? What about posting on social media like a self-absorbed and inconsiderate jerk? Self-promotion is a necessary part of work, but it feels unnatural to many of us. A lot of people grew up with an old-school work ethic: Put your head down, do good work, stay modest, and don’t draw attention to yourself. You learn to fly under the radar and hope your results speak for you. But if you’re an artist, writer, freelancer, or entrepreneur, people first need to know that your…

Last week I attended FOST London 2026, mostly I was there for apidays and the OpenAPI Initiative track. As ever, there was a set of excellent talks and I particularly liked Abby Bangser's opening keynote, Steven Willmott's talk on how to think about software systems as AI is added to them, and Kristof Van Tomme's thoughts on where developer portals fit into today's AI world. The OpenAPI track was excellent. We started with Frank Kilcommins covering API workflows before Lorna Mitchell talked…

I can't think of any decent puns on Silverfall, I'm sorry. Goldrise? Bronze...holdstill?

The week was kinda low-key actually, not too much happening and kinda sleepy. I got my nails filled in and the lady who did them this time wasn't as good as the lady last time, so I gotta be picky now with who I book lol. But the weekend !! We flew up to Melbourne Saturday morning, we were a little rushed since we had a busy night the night before. But we got it all done and made it to the airport in time. Although,,, we forgot our PAX badges ;;;; Hopefully one of our oomfs can grab it for us,…

RubyLLM 2.0 is the biggest release since 1.0. It starts with tool approval: class RefundOrder < RubyLLM::Tool description "Refunds an order" parameter :order_id, description: "ID of the order to refund" requires_approval # that's all it takes def execute(order_id:, tool_call: nil) Refunds.issue(order_id:, idempotency_key: tool_call.id) end end class SupportAgent < RubyLLM::Agent chat_model Chat tools RefundOrder end chat = SupportAgent.create! chat.ask "I was charged twice for order 42." #…

Pubs (from Public Houses) evolved over centuries in England and, if you really need to know, can be separated into three categories – these are inns, taverns and ale houses. Each had a slightly different purpose, which the video below by Historic England explains really well. However, if you go to any town or city in the UK that has been around for a thousand years or more (and there are many of those!), then you will often find this pub or that pub being mooted as the oldest in the land.…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Clifford Thompson’s novel Let Us Go Then, You and I is a remarkable fiction debut. Kirkus wrote of the book: “A midlife-crisis novel that searches for the meaning of life with sympathy and…