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…

In the immortal words of M. Mario, "here we go!" If this is new to you, what I'm doing here is reviewing the mince pies from most of the major UK shops. I started doing this a few years ago because I thought it would be fun, and I really like mince pies, so I was going to eat them anyway. Which means I'm also going to buy them all anyway, but if you'd like to support my excessive festive

Nova 2022, Sylvaine My rating: Loved it! I’ve been listening to Sylvaine a lot recently and this is my favorite album by far. It carries a lot of emotion and creates soundscapes that are simply amazing to be immersed in. “Mono No Aware” and “I Close My Eyes so I Can See” are the standouts, but there’s really no weak songs here. Perfect for a rainy day.

America is back! I know there’s a lot of work ahead, but my goodness, what a wonderful surprise. Delighted and relieved and hopeful. A boring but thankfully short update on tools: since I posted about retiring Liszt (and that retirement is now official, by the way; using plain text notes in Codex for to-do lists has been working well), I’ve also retired Storybook (I use my Codex app instead) and Momentum (replaced by the built-in stopwatch app and a step counter app). To simplify things…

A busy week with lots of term test administation.

Goodbye Philips Hue Bridge: moving my lighting to Home Assistant ZHA I’ve used Philips Hue for years, although many of the bulbs connected to my Hue Bridge weren’t made by Philips. Over time, I’d added IKEA TRÅDFRI and Innr bulbs, which generally worked well enough. Meanwhile, I’d started building a separate Zigbee network using Home Assistant, leaving me with two Zigbee networks in the same house. With a Home Assistant Green (a dedicated device for running Home Assistant), a Home Assistant…

“That’s a shame.” I’ve been meaning to have a series like this for the longest time, now that things likes this, coding-wise, are so simple, here we go. Tesla to end Cybertruck production as sales stall at ~10% of planTesla will wind down Cybertruck production in mid-2027. Musk blames Cybercab, but the truck sells at about a tenth of its planned 250,000 units a year.electrek.co Meta warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder | TechCrunchMeta warns that…

It’s a brave thing to change a restaurant that people already love. Especially when that restaurant happens to be a pub in the Cotswolds where people have become rather attached to the idea that Sunday lunch should involve a serious quantity of beef, potatoes in at least two forms and enough gravy to make a cardiologist nervous. The Halfway at Kineton had established itself as exactly that sort of place. Under Nathan Eades and Liam Goff, it became a destination for people who appreciate cooking…

After months of severe haze from Indonesian forest fires, Malaysia’s skies cleared, restoring life and relief. The crisis, driven largely by land clearing and compounded by ineffective governance, has strained regional relations and fueled online hostility. Although ASEAN faces pressure to act, its non-interference policy and corporate accountability disputes make meaningful solutions difficult.

TL;DR The DNS you’re using for a given domain may not have a suitable API for automating DNS-01 challenges, but that can be worked around by delegating to a sub domain (say acme.example.com) hosted somewhere that has a decent API. Background I was recently setting up some new services that would need TLS certificates. One of those services would not be publicly accessible, so HTTP-01 challenges weren’t going to work. No problem, I was planning to use Caddy on the front end, and I’d already used…

Signboard has had some nice bug fixes and MCP, CLI updates in its most recent two point releases. You can get them on GitHub. Version 2.0 has made a lot of progress. I’m excited to get that out soon.

New phones arrived, so doubtless I will lose a ton of today to setting them up. But our iPhone 14 Pro’s batteries are shot and the devices themselves are starting to glitch a bit, so it’s time. For my next trick, I need to back 3000 photos off my current phone….! Mystery origin of iconic Stonehenge Altar Stone deepens as search narrows Ancient coins suggest influential Iron Age king was female (also possibly her fault Rome invaded Britain in the time of Claudius in the first place) 17th-century…

I mentioned in September that I’d started drawing single-panel cartoons again and submitting them to Private Eye. I’ve been sending them more every fortnight since, and will keep at it until something lands… so far, though, they haven’t taken any. Neither have The Oldie, who also publish single-panel gags. They have a longer lead time as a monthly magazine, so I’ve had to wait even longer to see if they’ve run some. I suppose I could keep trying other markets, but I’m not aiming for The New…

Hey there. Quick update: This week, I finished the first draft of Street-Smart Coding in the Age of AI and already reached out to some of my loyal beta readers. You can preorder your ebook copy starting at just $1. In case you missed last email, Street-Smart Coding in the Age of AI is book #3 in my Street-Smart Coding collection. It’s a short and actionable guide to help you leverage AI without becoming dependent on it. The first draft sits around 5K words. You can finish it over coffee. Here…

A forested valley stretches to rugged, snow-capped mountains at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The post Rocky Mountain Valley appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Morton rock salt for sale, February 2025 (photo by Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) 6 November 2026 Because of the strong El Niño, this winter in the Great Lakes area promises to be warmer than normal with much less snow. Seasonal Temperature Outlook for Dec-Jan-Feb 2026-27 (map from NOAA Climate Prediction Center) This is fortunate for northern Ohio because a significant water intrusion on 22 October closed the Morton Salt Mine at Fairport Harbor that’s the main…

indiewebblogging I Discreetly Weaponized My Blog to Motivate My Writing A monthly word-count tracker hidden in plain sight https://khleedril.org/blog/2026-11-06--weaponized-blog.html khleedril.org/2026-11-06--weaponized-blog Dale Mellor https://khleedril.org/dale-mellor 6th November, 2026 Have you spotted it yet? I find that the only thing which motivates me to write is to constantly count words. The only targets meaningful to me when I sit down to write are when I tell myself that I am going…

A documentary about Francesca Woodman and her family. I love her work. Francesca was a troubled genius who ended her life way too soon. The movie was grim and kind of depressing. Her parents were indifferent, jealous, narcissistic, and aloof. Her dad was a failed artist and ended up stealing is daughter's visual language after her death. I never new that and it pissed me off. ✍️ Reply by email

Imagine a one-armed bandit. No, not a highwayman with a missing limb, but a slot machine. You pull the lever, the winning 777 combination appears, and the computer runs exactly the command you need right now. But if the winning combination doesn't come up... anything could happen. For some reason, you decide to keep pulling the lever anyway, but you get the feeling you should somehow minimize the unwanted side effects. That's how I picture AI models that can run arbitrary commands on your own…

Weihnachten kommt schneller als ihr denkt und deswegen haue ich schon mal den ersten Weihnachtspost hier raus. Wenn ich das Weihnachtsessen plane, ist mir der Hauptgang oft schon klar. Meist habe ich eher Probleme die Vorspeisen zu planen. Diese leckeren weihnachtlichen Blätterteig-Häppchen könnt ihr entweder super als kleines Amuse-Gueule zum Auftakt-Prosecco reichen oder ihr könnt es auch als leckere Vorspeise mit einem frischen Feldsalat servieren. Rezept | Weihnachtliche…

Pennine Tower flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says: We found some great historic images in Mastodon posted by @eastblocvisuals Explore their feed, and find an image you can add a caption to bring it into modern times. Better yet, meme it! Does anyone even create meme images anymore or is it GenAI all the way down? The simplest create, adding text to an image. Also, please credit the source image with a link, eh? Here is the…

it feels so fucking weird to have such a philosophical grasp on how to handle life. yet i know that i know nothing... quote socrates what is the meaning of life. what is your instrinsic motiviation to do things. its love which is the only thing socrates claimed to be an expert on in apollos apology. and ive broken love down to its nuanced concepts enough times and done enough art to represent those ideas that i know exactly what love means. i cant answer the question though, i think its similar…

My home internet is a Nokia FastMile 5G Gateway 3.2—an unlocked unit I bought and own, not a carrier box. Under the hood it’s just OpenWrt with a locked-down Nokia web UI bolted on top. So I spent a few evenings opening it up and extending it. It’s my router and I’ll pry if I want to! Getting root Interestingly this required no exploit—I drove the device’s own management client. The firmware only sends TR-069 out the cellular interface, so a local ACS never hears from it. Others hit the same…

I have never seen this before. And I had a lot of fun catching up. Chucky is pretty foul-mouthed, which surprised me. But it made sense. Chucky is really well made and pretty scary, too. Pair this with some 80s aesthetic and explosions and you have a pretty fun night.👍 Recommended!

If there is one way to truly get under the skin of a beer it is through a vertical tasting. It was therefore a great pleasure to take part in such a tasting of St Austell Brewery’s 2026 Extra Special Tribute beer with brewing director Georgina Young. She guided guests from the British Guild of…

Although the great economist Maynard Keynes and his contemporaries never spoke about growth, it’s now the main priority for all politicians. They want the economic cake to grow rather than have to make painful and unpopular decisions about cutting public services or increasing redistribution. The politicians should thus be grateful for the epidemic of obesity and its related epidemic of type II diabetes as they are good for growth. I will explain why. Crucially I’m talking about growth measured…

A470: Poems for the Road / Cerddi'r Fforddby Sian Northey (editor), Ness Owen (editor)Genres: Poetry Pages: 114 Rating: Synopsis: Fifty poems by Welsh poets celebrating the A470. Originaly written in Welsh or English, every poem has been translated into the other language and set out side by side as we travel the length of the country. Coming in from outside Wales, the A470 isn’t such a feature, and since that was pretty much always my lot, somehow Ness Owen and Sian Northey’s earlier…

In my childhood, my parents would occasionally use some catch-phrase that became familiar yet I had no idea where it came from.As just one example, I remember they laughed about Fibber McGee's closet. Went right over my young head. I was born in the age of television and old radio shows were not on my radar. When I tuned into the radio, I wanted rock 'n roll music, not corny comedy or melodrama.Tune In Yesterday by John DunningA few years ago, I picked up this encyclopedic volume describing the…

I wanted to try and keep with Jes Goodwin sculpts for the majority of my Mordheim possessed warband. This is a little tricky as most of his fantasy miniatures are either armoured or elves, or both! The brethren have been causing me a few headaches (being low-rate humans with minimal armour and poor quality gear).I ended up starting with a couple of converted figures for this first pair of brethren, and I'm hoping they might provide a template for future additions.Read more »