Remember when Netflix was going to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery and the deal was all but done? Recall how Skydance/Paramount wouldn't quit trying to make itself the owner, and kept at it until Netflix said, "Screw it, we're out," and walked away, with Skydance/Paramount, "Winning?" Well, Skydance/Paramount has gotten past a bunch of legal questions and has maneuvered itself to being an even bigger entertainment company than ever, with the head (David Ellison) being known as a bit of an…

Just so you know, if you unironically refer to people or things as "degenerate" you have already lost any moral ground you may have had to start with. We are now in "tell me you're a fascist without telling me you're a fascist" territory. Also, Hilary Layne is a reactionary hack. Thank you and good night.

I have several Hall effect keyboards from Gravastar, MelGeek, and others, that were designed for switches with lenses optimized for transparent keycaps. For many things, I prefer the front-legended, diffusing white keycaps from TacType. However, those switches don’t adequately illuminate the legends. I bought several sets of Hall Effect switches. I installed them on a Gravastar board. I put some TacType caps on the switches. All are better than the standard switches, one of which is on the…

Last week, I opened a can of worms. I asked on social media: Sometimes all you need is a trustworthy title HTML attribute for a text-only tooltip. Only problem is: it can't be styled! Do you want these tooltips to be stylable? Maybe with a ::tooltip pseudo? See the threads on Mastodon and on Bluesky. If only styling was the only problem! I quickly realized that I hadn't had to think about tooltips on the web for a long time. Turns out, the title attribute is strongly discouraged for most use…

Looks like we found a rare Authum crocus in the wild.

This is the first half of the third part (I, II) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game, easily one of the most popular historical games on the market today and thus tremendously influential in both the popular history and gaming spaces. Over the last two parts, we took a look at the military simulation that sits at the heart of Hearts of Iron, a division-level operational simulation of World War II, along with the…

Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman I think this is good advice! It’s something I put into practice with my RSS feed reader. I realized that readers with unread counts and an inbox/email like design were just not a good fit for me.

Some mesmerizing renditions of Star Spangled BannerAs you can see on the cover, some spectators had funCarl Lewis.mp3Cela Harper.mp3Christina Aguilera.mp3Fergie.mp3Ingrid Andress.mp3Kinsley Murray.mp3Malea Emma.mp3Maya Rudolph.mp3Roseanne Barr.mp3Sound&Sight God Save AmericaThe others can rot

I’m regularly optimizing the software I build, which means I’m also regularly looking for benchmarks that can tell me whether an improvement is actually meaningful.When I’m working with coding agents, though, I’ve noticed that it's easy to be surprisingly sloppy about this. The easy default is often wall-clock time: make a change, run something before and after, and see whether it got faster.The problem is that wall time can be noisy and, more importantly, may not actually measure the mechanism…

Went out for a run with Simon and Tommy today. Was lovely. Then I was a massive idiot.333 words · 1 image

October begins two-for-two with Pook-Emu Bee Links before our regularly scheduled Saturday off-day for the Newsletter Leaf Journal. I think they’re hoping you get the hint 1 | Japan announces new permanent residency guidelines, foreigners must earn more than average Japanese person (Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. Oct. 1, 2026.) The earning threshold shouldn’t be too hard to hit. 10 years residence for non-marriage cases however… They’re definitely trying to tell you something. To his credit,…

In my previous posting, "The Rip-Off", I described how I won — along every conceivable parameter, really — while making the most loser-ish real estate move possible. I claimed that this changed everything. But I just remembered that I learned this move ages ago. A dysfunctional girlfriend who constantly complained about everyone in her life being out to destroy her accidentally sent me an email intended for her best friend, in which, to my non-surprise, she described me as out to destroy her…

8701/21620Coming up with a joke about or a reimagining of old kids TV shows for every Newsround might become a bit of a chore, but so far I've managed to come up with over 100 of them. My favourites are the ones that unite two very obscure ideas meaning they are likely only to be understood by a handful of my fairly small audience.Today it struck me how weird that Noel Edmond's Saturday morning show as called The Multicoloured Swap Shop. It was hardly any of those things.

It’s been a crazy but good week. It’s also been a fun week. Last Friday was a long class at APU before the midterm holidays, which kind of tired me out, so I spent most of Saturday at home resting. Silva – Goa Sunday, I went to FOSSIndia/2026. I met a bunch of people, did my BoF session on microgrants, and then also got Cardputer Adv (with Mesthstatic) from Kiran. Also met lots of other folks: Tanvi, Adhavan, Vivek, Aman, Rukmini, Arun, Noopur, Padmini, Pranesh etc. I have missed mentioning a…

I’m not sure what’s sillier, asking for the Date and Time, or having the user submit the App version, in an unknown format while you are in the in-app browser of said app with no way to look up the version string. At least they didn’t validate the format, so I could submit “I’m using the in-app browser and can’t check” there.

This will be a very short post but the games collection Cartomancy Anthology is now free on Steam and Itch.io. It’s a games anthology where you pick the game you want to play by drawing from a tarot deck. I originally got it from backing a Kickstarter a while ago but I’m really happy it’s free so more folks will play it. So many game developers I’m a fan of worked on it and I highly recommend checking it out!

Semafor published a graph earlier this week purportedly showing a staggering decline in tourism to the United States from five countries. Among them, it appeared to illustrate a decline from over twenty million Canadian visitors a few years ago to under eight million this year. That felt fishy to me as I had also recently read a Statistics Canada bulletin claiming Canadian travel to the U.S. in June rose by 5% year-over-year, marking the “third consecutive month of growth”. How do we reconcile…

Tron Kirk/Church was commissioned in Edinburgh by King Charles I from Scot­t­ish architect John Myle, as part of the plan to upgrade Edinburgh to city status. And it seems that the timing was critical. King Charles was try­ing to impose an Episcopal structure onto the reluctant Scottish Church. This was just after the bishopric designation of Edinburgh’s High Kirk St Giles in the royal charter of 1633.Looking along the Royal Mile to Tron Kirk. Furthermore the location was also significant. The…

Ok, I lie, this demo is also pretty simple, but I wanted to break the pattern of the last few posts and at least pretend this example is a bit more complex. As I try to find excuses to write more TypeScript, I thought a great example of that would be a simple RSS aggregator. You hit the site, tell it the feeds you care about, and it renders a date sorted list of entries. Because RSS typically can't be parsed in client-side JavaScript (don't know why? ask me below!) so I'd have to make use of a…

Is it just Florida, or do campaign ads for Governor in other states feel like sketches from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! or I Think You Should Leave? The post Florida campaign ads for Governor appeared first on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The title for my autobiography would probably be I Thought I Was a Child Prodigy But I Am Actually a Late Bloomer. Going from being the youngest guy in the room to the oldest guy in the room happens suddenly, surprisingly, and permanently. As such, the programming languages and technologies I learned long ago are esoteric knowledge but the systems they run on still exist. Everything’s moved up a level of abstraction or six and there’s a lot of low-hanging value in plain old systems programming…

Download a copy of CPython’s source: % git clone https://github.com/python/cpython Where is zip implemented? % cd cpython % grep -Irn "def zip" ... bunch of stuff about zipfile... % grep -Irn \"zip ... ./Python/bltinmodule.c:3313: "zip() argument %zd is shorter than argument%s%zd", ./Python/bltinmodule.c:3323: "zip() argument %zd is longer than argument%s%zd", ./Python/bltinmodule.c:3369:"zip(*iterables, strict=False)\n\ ./Python/bltinmodule.c:3385: "zip", /* tp_name */…

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5 Stars - A speculative fiction page turner that was right up my street! The post The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

It should be noted, for the record, that Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. He did implement a series of programmes that saw some of the trains - principally the ones foreign journalists and tourists might use - run on a far more efficient basis, but in the main, Italian Railways were chaotic before fascism and remained chaotic throughout. Similarly, though Mussolini liked to claim the credit for Milano Centrale, it was actually a building that had been planned for a couple of…

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about fears: As a book lover, what’s your biggest fear? On the personal level, that my house will burn down. So many books, and I don’t know if they can all be reasonably replaced, including ones with…

The calendar claims it’s October already but the temperatures are still in denial. I can’t remember ever experiencing the start of this month that warm. It’s getting scary! See what I did there? Because of October? Spooky month? Scary? No? Worth a shot. What happened in September? More letter writing! The snail mail project is going well. I keep track of the amount of outbound letters: the grand total for the last two months is 20 handwritten letters. If you’d like to chime in, please let me…

Not a normal debate. The debate about whether AI is a “normal technology” has been spun into overdrive with AI-generated musicals defending each side. (AI-musical is becoming a thing.) A Normal Debate?

If you're the kind of knockabout person who likes to dress up their abode with some politically tinged artwork, then the people (?) at Wefail Art are right up your unloved and potholed street. It's not cheap, it's not free, but it is art after all, and more fun than a rogue "Ring" front door security system. Click on this rather sardonic but effective "Scotland Travel" poster to find out more. What better way to remember the messed up summer of '26?

What do markets reveal about American cultural preferences and priorities? Revealed Preferences How can we know what people really think? It’s a hard problem. People will sometimes refuse to answer. Sometimes they’ll engage in varying degrees of lying, by telling you what they think you want to know or what will make them look good. This is one of the banes of political scientists designing polls, sociologists designing experiments, and psychologists pleading with therapy clients to be…