Book review for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I rated it 4 stars. After reading The House of the Scorpion, the other book that came to mind for me on a similar topic was Never Let Me Go which I decided to pick up for a re-read (I last read it in 2020). The book is told in a simple first person style from the perspective of Kathy, a woman reminiscing on her days at a boarding school called Hailsham. At first everything seems rather immature and pointless, with her reliving inconsequential…

TL;DR Link to heading I run a WireGuard server on a spot f1-micro in London and keep it stopped when I’m not using it; it stops itself 5 minutes after the last device disconnects. A small Cloud Run function starts or stops the VM and points a DNS name at its new IP, so my laptop and iPhone both connect to vpn.example.com. From the laptop, traffic flows within about a minute of asking for it; on the phone I run a Shortcut, then switch the tunnel on once it returns. By my sums from Google’s list…

Here's a roundup of what I've been up since the last post. I almost lost my shit at work. I guess it was a build up of stress. Once I went for a walk, decided to go back and took some deep breathes it all seemed good again. Still not sure what the next step is in the career / job front. I'm typing this before I go back to work after having 4 days off. I've always had the ability to switch off from work when I go home, which is a good thing to be able to do. This time it sort of feels…

The increasing ubiquity, quality and variety of alcohol-free beer has meant that it’s slowly become a meaningful part of our drinking habits. A few years ago it was common for people like the late Peter ‘Pub Curmudgeon’ Edwardson to argue that nobody ever drank AF beer except as an emergency measure. For example, because they were the designated driver. And if you told them that, actually, you were going to pay for cabs for everyone, they’d hurl their half-finished bottle of Heineken 0.0 into…

Earlier this week I wrote a post about the Cornell rapes – about how awkward it can be to speak up against rape culture, and why it’s so important that men try to do it anyway. I’d love you guys to understand that being a ‘good guy’ doesn’t usually mean saying the right thing and […] The post How to be difficult appeared first on Girl on the Net.

Earlier today when I was standing in the supermarket waiting for an order I had placed for collection (a new kettle), I found myself wondering, if I was locked in here because of some sort of disaster scenario, how long do I think I could last. All the dehydrated noodles, canned goods, rice and pasta make me think that I could probably last quite a long time. There’s also loads of frozen food but I’d have to hope that whereas I was waiting for my kettle, someone else was waiting on an air fryer…

The next statusbar version will be so good. It will break compatibility with current config files, and the cli shape will change slightly, so I'm taking my time to make sure it won't change again after a couple of weeks.

I’ve spent the last week working with Opus 5.5 and I’m loving it (except for those annoying safety filters that trigger whenever you mention something security-related, no matter what). It’s significantly better than Opus 5, and cheaper ($20 per million output tokens compared to the $25 of Opus 5). And this wasn’t the only recent release that landed with more intelligence at a lower price.In the space of eight days, xAI shipped Grok 4.7 at $6 per million output tokens, OpenAI released GPT-6 and…

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding Pythagorean triples and prime numbers. (Note that this ends today.)

Azimin Saini, CNA: The chicken is now poached in a master stock flavoured with soy sauce, spices, orange peel and rock sugar, giving it a caramel colour. Before serving, it goes briefly onto the grill to crisp the skin and pick up a little smokiness. Everything else – the rice, cucumbers, chilli and cilantro – remains the same. That small adjustment captures a question Yong and Malvaez have been discussing since they started Makan: What is Singaporean food, and what can it become when the…

Arthur Machen regularly contributed short stories, vignettes, and articles to literary periodicals from early in his career. Never able to make a good and reliable living by journalism – let alone his books – after the death of his first wife Machen went on the stage, joining Frank Benson’s touring company. He continued to publish articles and reviews in numerous London literary magazines,

Last week I introduced Dawson Creek. This latest commission build, an industrial narrow gauge line pictured towards the end of its life, perched atop the marshy North bank of the River Tees, clinging on for dear life, literally…Last week I also shared the video detailing my feelings, design intent and the methods involved in creating this wonderful little cameo presentation. That video has been viewed over 10,000 times in just over two days. It seems I’ve not only captured the feel of a winters…

If one can listen to all the music (for a monthly fee) and all the podcasting talks anytime on your smartphone, what reasons left to tune in to an FM radio? The DJs for a live human connection? Not. ~ Link: An AI Radio DJ Has Shot to Stardom in LA Human Hosts Aren't Happy About It, by Nilesh Christopher, Los Angeles Times

Dead Poets Society 1989, Peter Weir My rating: I like it Classics are classics for a reason, right? Such a beautiful movie! And feels really good to watch, too. The scenes just flow with such levity and you don’t even feel the time pass.

We had our first Interesting Assemble on Wednesday. The extraordinary Dr Helen Castor joined us to expand on her talk from Interesting in 2016.Fantastic questions from the assembled audience which Helen fielded with deep expertise.Dave 'Funkypancake' Simpson is doing the next one, on October 29th. It's free but you have to get a ticket.

11 months after my first post, I have finally read enough “early English” novels to write a part 2. This was less of a self-contained spree than my first endeavour, and I did take breaks to read other things which I have omitted from this post in order to keep things a bit more focused. Still, as I alluded to at the end of my last post, my plan was to read a couple books from each of: Dickens, Hardy and Eliot after which I would no doubt feel satisfied and able to move onto a different pocket…

Deception in dialogue… Image by Author, created in AI based on a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo that captures two pinch-faced elderly women on a sidewalk outside The Crescent Bar in New Orleans, circa 1947 and clearly out of their element. Melva: “Well, I do declare. Look at that mess over there!” Gertrude: “Honey, this is New Awlins. We got mess everywhere. Which one you talkin’ ‘bout?” Melva: “Right there in front of your dadgum eyes, woman. You go off and leave you spectacles back home again?”…

2026-10-04 Autobanning Bad Requests Like everyone, I get a lot of bots scraping my content. I'm quite intentional about what how my content can be used. I'm more than happy for people use my site, but not for commercial purposes including training AI. My robots.txt file disallows all bots except the few that I permit.1 I return 403 Forbidden responses to any unauthorized bot that happens to request a URL anyway. The request is probably from someone else with a spoofed User-Agent header. There…

Hammett keeps his hand in the game. Offhand, I don’t recall the Continental Op showing up in Jeopardy! clews before now. Usually it’s Sam Spade or Nick and Nora Charles — or Asta. Sometimes Lillian Hellman or Joe McCarthy. San Francisco. On Friday October 2 —S43 E15 — first round. $1000 clew. Category: Red to be Read. Picture of Hammett as Ken Jennings does voice-over on the following: One of the earliest tough guy detectives, the Continental Op shows up in 1929’s Red Harvest by this author Guy…

Back at work again today. Quite a nice day. Mild. A lot in for burning including a pig. Washed T and E’s cars making 128 to date. No.1 on red.

The web got professional, scalable, and utterly dull. Now boring infrastructure and language models are making room for small, weird creations again.

Let's take a break from Sunday Snoozles™ and with GDB friend Bu a very Happy Birthday! You all know how Sue B. is on top of things, birthday-wise... she sent along with scan from July, 1982 which (I believe) is from the "Bu era". Hidden behind the throngs of humanity is a balloon vendor. IS IT BU?? Well,we can't be sure.Another thing Sue scanned for this occasion is a 1985 guide/gate handout (brought to you by Kodak). Over 40 years have elapsed since these were given to guests, so there have…

Snake Eyes (1998)

No need to waste your time going to school or reading page after page of A People's History of America, y'all! You think our President bothered reading fake news? Here's AMERICAN HISTORY in a nutshell- sweet, short, concise and as true as you is blue! And if ya wanna be A Patriot, good news too- ya don't have to train like Jason Bourne!!!

One week at number one on 2nd July 1988It’s another strange backwards step for the blog. “Atmosphere” was originally released in the UK in 1980 and topped the MRIB Indie Charts in October of that year. That occurred, however, around six months before the NME introduced their nationally compiled indie listings*, so for our purposes, it’s the 118th new number one. Its re-release was greeted with a certain amount of criticism, being regarded in some quarters as exploitative, using Ian Curtis’s…

Felix Holt (b. Murray, Calloway County, Kentucky, 20 December 1897; d. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 3 June 1956*) Felix Cacilock Holt was the sixth child of Crawford Duncan ("C.D.") Holt (1858-1950) and Sally Bridewell Allen (1861-1947), who were married on 3 July 1878. He had two older sisters, plus three siblings who had died young. His education ended with the eighth grade

Quick bits MacOS Golden Gate, which I upgraded to last week, is buggy. My primary annoyance is that the focus occasionally gets taken, with no rhyme or reason, by another window. It sure is annoying to be suddenly typing in a different window. On the tube, a kid pointed at me and asked his mum “what is that?” How rude! London problems: not getting sleep because there is a fox screaming at the bedroom window in the dead of the night. I still lack a cozy reading corner in my home, and this is one…

Share a song you feel was ahead of its time. There are some obvious tracks, Blue Monday (‘83) sounds like a track from the mid 90s club nights, I Feel Love (‘77) setting up electronica that wouldn’t appear for at least a decade, Teardrop (‘98) laid tracks for trip-hop artists to follow, and you could even argue that Smells Like Teen Spirit (‘91) set a pathway for rock music through that decade. But I love the Chemical Brothers, so I’ve always found it startling to hear them involved in a track…

Trying to get my xbox controller to connect on CachyOS (booting through the test usb, maybe part of the problem). Not discoverable, even after the firmwear update. (Actually one was discoverable before the update.) Reading forum posts and the number of people who have absolutely no shame in saying Grok/Copilot/ChatGPT told me to do this (and then sometimes copy wholesale the response) is staggering. Pena ajena. Anyway, if you're reading this and have any tips, I'm all ears. #cachyos #linux