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

A tenant-boundary defect shows Distill in use: locked inputs, inspectable manifests, repeatable builds, and explicit integrity failures.

Becca and Jack are aware this weekend and I, unwittingly, have stumbled into a Christopher Nolan themed couple of days. I love movies, I love the art, the cinematography, the camera shot choices, the scripts, the characters arcs, the whole thing. From set design, lighting choices, editing choices and more, is utterly fascinating. I grew up watching old movies on a Sunday afternoon. We had 3 TV channels and that was your choice. Thankfully some of those movies were Hitchcock (a surprisingly…

Black Canyon of Gunnison, Colorado By Charles Eisele 1854-1919 Oil on canvas 22 x 36 inches Signed lower Left. Very unusual subject. I have never heard of a painting of it before. Of course the title may be bull too.

Raspberry Pis are like iPads and other tablets for me: I like the idea of them, but then I get them and immediately regret it. Then sufficient time passes, I forget, and I think huh, that might be cool. Rinse, and repeat. It’s a bit of a shame, really. A tiny single-board computer? What’s not to love about it? Well, as it turns out, many things. This weekend I updated our Pi 400, and tried reviving an older Pi 1 Model A+ for a friend to use as a Pi-Hole, and it was like pulling teeth. I could…

Wine with friends Sam, Emile, Tim & Ben joined Bill and I for family dinner. Some nice wine was drunk.

Blurbs are the endorsements put on books, usually newly published ones, to help a book gain some sort of notice. They are usually contributed by friends of the author, or solicited by the publisher from recognizable names in the field. The question of blurbs by Evangeline Walton came up during my conversation at the youtube channel MaskedManta released on Tuesday September 29th. (You can view it

Today I am continuing my monthly blog housekeeping by taking a look at the #MurderEveryMonday themes from September. If you are new to #MurderEveryMonday, it is a book cover sharing activity, which I host on Twitter a.k.a. X and Instagram and it is nice to hear that it has spread on to other social media platforms too, such as Blue Sky. As the hashtag suggests this activity takes place on a Monday and each week has a different theme. For more info here is my launch post. Here are the four…

Here I am again with another Meals of the Week Post. On Sundays I like to share with you, my dear readers, all of the meals that I have enjoyed eating as my main meals over this past week. When you are a person that lives on their own there can be a tendency to eat out of tins, or to eat frozen meals. I don't want that to be my life and if I can inspire one person to also want to cook for themselves, then I think that's a great thing.My late mother lived all on her own from the age of 54 to 81…

Rural vibes ✅ Village pond (ring of benches, reedy growth, warning of deep water, rustic litter bins, lifebelt on back of bus shelter, inevitable ducks) ✅ Village green (picnic benches, memorial trough, beacon, premature fallen leaves, beech mast, bronze statue of girl reading book) ✅ Village shop (shuts for lunch, reopens bang on time, sparse shelves, AI-drawn poster in window, still sells newspapers but also artisan breads and Fairtrade jars, includes craft workshop space) ✅ Former village…

Sigh. Yesterday's post was done in, in part, by tech issues. But, truth be told, there were also health issues. While everyone contributes to the weekend post, (Z) is the glue. And (Z) is still trying to get over being ill. After 4-5 days of getting better, Friday was worse and Saturday was worse still. This is not the first time this pattern has happened—not by a long shot. Get to 85% or 90%, return to 100% of usual activity, and then the respiratory infection lingers on and on and on. The…

Today, Brazilians vote for president, 2/3 of the Senate, and the lower house. I'm not only hoping that younger Bolsonaro does not get elected, but also hoping that people do not make far-right candidates a majority in the Senate and the lower house. Sadly, as with mostly everywhere else in the world, social networks are making reality a bit nebulous for people who "don't follow politics" or "don't care about politics", so it's hard to say how it will go. In any case, we'll have the results a…

My name is Chris and I'm afraid of daemons. Well, not literally but I am engineering the firmware for an embedded, real-time device. And I chose to use Debian Linux with systemd. What I'm afraid of are background processes, daemons, performing actions I don't anticipate. This article explains how I create a linux image for my device with only a handful purposeful daemons.

Desert Brat 2026-10-04

Power Cat 2026-10-04

Kev Quirk recently published an interesting post wondering if webmentions violate privacy. Someone’s argument to him was that an individual posting on one website did not ‘realise – or explicitly consent to – their replies being republished on an external blog’. This is an interesting argument against privacy violations, but not the strongest one. That would be what Kev calls ‘deletion persistence’. Along the same lines, it is also worth considering whether webmentions violate copyright. Let us…

I called my Robin Hood time an OPB and didn't really explain it. It stands for Old Man Personal Best. When I turned 40 I deleted every personal best I had, wiped everything off Strava, and started counting again from zero. I've not regretted it once.When I was younger, all the way through my teens, I shared the track and road with two club mates, Ian Boneham and Steve Ablit, who pushed me but always overshadowed me. Not to mention growing up in the same age group as a certain Sir Mo Farah. All…

I understand that this is now getting into the realms of the extremely nerdy. As part of my on-going investigation into the Western Command Stop Line Number 28 based around the Teme river I came across some further HER records1 for extant anti-tank cylinders that whilst also featuring on the Defence of Britain records do, oddly, not feature under the subset of records for the Teme river stop line. Now this might be oversight, as I can't see any reasoning that given their location, these…

A lord of beasts comes down from his domain. This is everything I want from a fantasy. A fascinating, unique world; tons of interesting moral dilemmas, and a lot of fucked up shit. For a while now I’ve been despairing of the genre. The number of crappy isekai anime… ugh. They’re awful in so many ways, but what really gets me is how they completely fail to grasp what makes people love the things they’re supposedly based on. People love RPG games for the grand stories and the imaginative worlds…

This is the list of Python questions I use when interviewing junior developers. It's not complete, and a few questions are a bit odd on purpose — they show quickly who has actually written Python and who has only read about it. Each question now has a short answer I'd be happy to hear in an interview, plus code where it helps. Try to answer first, then check. Where it matters, there's also a note on what I'm actually listening for, because the right answer said badly and a half-right answer…

This is the list of Python questions I use when interviewing mid-level developers. It's not complete, and some questions are a bit odd on purpose. Each one now has a short answer and code where it helps. Try to answer first, then check. The series has three parts: Python Interview Questions for Junior Developers Python Interview Questions for Mid-Level Developers (this page) Python Interview Questions for Senior Developers What "middle" means here Let's define the levels first. The way I see…