The Amazing Race has an iconic, simple format. But the reality is that, during season one, many of the decisions were made while filming was underway—or after it was over.

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, a service by posting extracts of his book on my website.…

Mayoral debates⭐ Arts Ottawa debateHear where Ottawa's mayoral candidates stand on the future of arts and culture, including cultural infrastructure, arts funding, creative spaces, festivals, and support for artists and cultural workers. Hosted by Arts Ottawa, Ottawa Festivals, and OMIC ⭐ Ottawa Board of Trade debateThe Ottawa Board of Trade presents this 2026 Mayoral Debate, featuring Ottawa’s leading mayoral candidates, as they discuss key issues shaping the city’s future. The debate explores…

An aggregation is some kind of summary of a set of data. This can be the sum, length, minimum, etc. It is quite common to want to calculate such a summary repeatedly, e.g. “the maximum noise level in dB for the past 30 seconds” for a nuisance detector. In such a case we say there is a sliding window over our data, and we want to aggregate over our window. If our aggregation is a binary operator with an inverse, like integer sums, there is a very easy solution using a double-ended queue: from…

At Green IO this week, I heard about offshore wind, sustainability data, and cloud certification. This post has some notes I took. They all in some way relate to what can get us to more sustainable IT quicker. Better sustainability data It's really hard to reason about your organisation's impacts without data. Hannah Smith (virtual) and Oliver Cronk (in-person) talked us through a new Green Web Foundation community project that helps with better data: Digital Impacts Schema and Taxonomy…

Released a new volume today, #138: The Gloams. Narratively, this book traces its lineage back to the Early Clues corpus, pieces of which are definitely still available online for the intrepid searcher, or autonomous AI research agent. The gloams, for me, are something like “floating point perceptual spheres,” and are loosely based on that quote which has many variations, but which this one supposedly is attributed to Empedocles: ‘The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere…

Vorgegarte Linsen nehme ich eigentlich so gut wie nie, für meine heißgeliebten Linsensuppen verwende ich immer getrocknete Ware. Auf der Suche nach einer Verwertung für eine Dose Bio-Berglinsen aus einem Wiener Schmankerlpackerl von meiner lieben Freundin kam mir ein Hummus in den Sinn und der ist so gut geworden, daß ich nach dem Knipsen sogleich ein paar Löffel ohne Brot weggeschleckt habe

9:06 – Mon 28 September 2026 12:06 – Mon 28 September 2026 9:07 – Tue 29 September 2026 12:03 – Tue 29 September 2026 8:38 – Wed 30 September 2026 9:01 – Wed 30 September 2026 12:07 – Wed 30 September 2026 9:02 – Thu 01 October 2026 12:01 – Thu 01 October 2026 9:03 – Fri 02 October 2026 12:05 – Fri 02 October 2026 Bonus Follow Me As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I…

If you are a regular viewer of Turner Classic Movies, you may have seen the documentary Beyond the Border: Latino Representation in Hollywood a few weeks ago. For those of you didn't, you really should check Beyond the Border: Latino Representation in Hollywood out. It is a documentary directed by Clara and Julia Kuppererg that examines Latino stereotypes, Latino erasure, and the eventual challenge to Hollywood that came about with the civil rights movement.What makes Beyond the Border: Latino…

There’s a new firmware update for the Fujifilm X half, and some of it is quite interesting. Before we dive in, let me briefly explain why I like the camera. There’s been a lot of negativity around the X half, mainly in Europe and especially America. Most of it has to do with the price, and also because you cannot shoot RAW or even Fujifilm Recipes. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms, but looking past that, the X half is a great “digital 110” pocket camera for casual snapshots. Last year,…

Short version: Run the following to retrieve the RSS feed of a YouTube channel, sans Shorts (replace the URL with your desired YouTuber's channel): curl -fsSL 'https://www.youtube.com/@broadcaststsatic' | grep -Eo '<link[^>]+type="application/rss\+xml"[^>]*>' | sed -E 's/.*href="([^"]+)".*/\1/' | sed 's/channel_id=UC/playlist_id=UULF/' The result looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULF5CYeHPLer3lbEhgonvbbAA. Long version: The last few times I've used YouTube…

📸 September snapshots. (Or: Yes, we got a new cat.)

This is an index of LEGO-related software and modelling tools. The existing LEGO Digital Designer and Bricksmith pages remain where they are; the table links to them and to newer LDraw tooling. Resources CategoryDateLinkNotesModelling2026-10ldraw-novaAgent tooling for generating LDraw LEGO models, with part and example search, collision and gap checks, rendering, and Blender-editable GLB export 2007-01LEGO Digital DesignerExisting Tao of Mac page for LEGO’s 3D modelling tool…

Memory has its own methods of excavation. What one generation buries, another may uncover without knowing what it has found. In Beginning Middle End, the soil of Sicily holds a family history whose meanings are still being negotiated: the narrator’s grandmother once worked here on an archaeological dig, and now the narrator arrives with her daughter, carrying the aftermath of a failed marriage. Elsewhere, her mother’s memories are slipping away. Between that loss and the accumulating…

See the companion post about procedures here. This is a quick play report to go along with my other post about combining the AD&D 1E Appendix A with OSE for a solo dungeon crawl. As an aid to anyone else thinking of trying this out, I'm adding notes on the procedural flow that led to the narrative outcomes in italics. The map below is the sections of the dungeon I've generated so far. Ura the dwarf is venturing to the dungeon near her home village, rumored to be the former stronghold of a…

View of Brunette River, pre-run: Gray, with a splash of fall colour. Yet another late start and as I headed outside, it was sprinkling a little, so I went back in, grabbed my Echo hoodie and headed off. Almost immediately the sprinkles stopped and I felt overdressed for the entire time I was out. Welcome to early fall running. I opted for the river trail and despite Performance Condition being +2, I still felt kind of slothful-even with a good night’s sleep, too. I was over six minutes for the…

A statement made on an AI training course I had to attend (I'm paraphrasing but this was the gist): "I really do believe this is how books will be consumed in the future - by the AI summarising it neatly for you". Riiiight... and who's going to be writing these books, once no one is reading them any more?? AI??? How long after that will your models collapse in on themselves, caught in some god-awful feedback loop of AI-generated garbage? I rather wish I was making this up...

One of many similar photos taken this evening. Glorious!

A few observations and thoughts about writing on the internet for four years. Doing fewer, bigger things 📝 This is post #130, meaning only 20 pieces this year. It’s much less than prior years, down from 32 and 42 posts per year the past two. This was my busiest year so far, for better and worse. Writing less seems like a reasonable trade for all the learning. 🎤 It was a thrill to speak a...

Your own brain farts never stink.

At the edge of the orchard stood a row of tall granary towers, built from timber and thatch, where the whole settlement kept its grain dry through winter. Every year, a pig named Bramwell was given the task of deciding which builder would move into the fine new quarters beside the millhouse, and whi…

A strangely compelling if rather disjointed story of modern life for a young person in today’s China. The overwhelming impression I get is a strange mix of frenetic entrepreneurship and stifling bureaucracy, with periods of boredom and depression. Our hero has a lot of jobs in very different industries but doesn’t seem to be able to stick to any of them for too long, despite demonstrating quite a wide range of skills and talents (although not salesmanship or negotiating skills it seems). It is…

Earlier this week, after many months of being shelved, I set up my 32” curved gaming display in my man-cave closet. Then I took my Switch OLED out of a storage bin and connected it. Next, paired up my bluetooth speaker and controller. After a long while recharging and updating the console, I had to pick one of my unfinished games to play. So now I’m back into Tears of the Kingdom. I’d only completed about half the story; already I’ve found new places in Hyrule! Fun times.

September 2026 Although I am still writing up my walks around the coast of Britain I have completed my walk around mainland Britain (although I am also now walking some of the islands of Scotland). I’ve also walked the coastlines of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man as well as most islands of England and Wales and Gibraltar. As I am still very much enjoying coastal walking I’ve also started walking the coast line of other countries. I have started to walk the coast of France, but as well as…

At a lake today all was quiet, then suddenly two herons took off and everything else panicked and it went from idyllic to chaos in seconds - ducks, pigeons, herons, crows - no doubt squirrels dived for cover too but they were drowned out. An encounter table should have a cascade effect - something like roll 2d4 more times and have them all happen at once - the dragon woke up, got the goblins running around, they let out the zombies, the bats are fleeing - general chaos throughout the dungeon.…

I got to play magic last night with a friend. My partner is off work today, and baking cupcakes for an event they're attending. I had a big breakfast of eggs, sausage, mushrooms, and zucchini. I have cozy music going while I watch Jerma. The windows are open, and it's gently raining outside. My medicine has got me feeling much less uncomfortable. I'm in my favorite robe, under my favorite blanket. We have the string lights on in the hallway. I feel heavenly. I feel the calm all the way to my…

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to prevent user generated content (UGC) from maliciously triggering HTMX 4 and Alpine.js behaviors in his ColdFusion output....

Get new posts by email Subscribe Enjoying the blog? Help with costs & future trips. Facebook Instagram Buy me a pint Historic Pubs and Hidden Gems in Digbeth A Friday evening exploring seven pubs around Digbeth, taking in everything from grand Victorian survivors to railway-arch bars and converted industrial buildings. I met up again with Neil from Neil’s Real Ale & Pub Page, starting at The Woodman before heading through Kilder, Nortons, The Anchor, The White Swan and The Spotted Dog, with The…

..and then we talk and for a moment I forget to hate myself