Alison Weir has written so many novels about the Tudors it’s surprising that she’s still able to find different angles and perspectives to write from. In The Boleyn Secret, she tells the story of Kate Carey, daughter of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary and, some believe, Henry VIII himself. There have been other books about Kate, but I haven’t read any (apart from where she’s mentioned as a minor character), so reading a whole book from her point of view was something new for me. Katherine Carey…
♠ Problem statement: a terraform project planned clean locally (terraform plan), but CI insisted on a diff. Every apply fixed it for one side and broke it for the other, back-and-forth. The culprit was a null_resource that rebuilds an AWS Lambda for a NodeJS app bundle whenever its sources change, keyed on a hash of the whole directory: resource "null_resource" "lambda_build" { triggers = { dir_sha = sha256(join("", [for f in sort(fileset("${path.module}/lambda", "**")) :…
Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Here’s an alternative to avoid cognitive debt (5min). #2. With AI, almost everyone is euphoric but nothing works (4min). #3. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is wrong. That’s what covers are for. But what if you could judge a book by its first page instead? (1min). #4. Last week, I discovered makestopmotion. A free, open-source, and local stop-motion app. And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about my 8-year…
8646/21565I never thought I'd be offended by anything on Netflix, but they really managed to get to me today via the email I got first thing."We've added something you might enjoy.... Alley Cats"Really Netflix? Do you think so poorly of me?I've taken great care to only watch the best comedy on your service, hoping you'd see me as someone with great taste who likes 30 Rock, Community, Bojack Horseman, early Rick and Morty.... why would you do this to me?It's like an elderly aunt you've never met…
If a privacy feature says it hides your IP address, every network request a website can trigger has to respect that promise. Protecting the main browser traffic is not enough when a side path can quietly go around it.Apple’s iCloud Private Relay is supposed to make Safari browsing harder to tie back to you. It replaces the IP address websites normally see and splits the connection across two relays, so no single party should know both who you are and which sites you visit.That is a useful…
If you are one that has been clamoring for IndyCar races every weekend, then this is your time. Beginning with this weekend, The NTT IndyCar Series will have six races over the next five weekends. Exactly one-third of the IndyCar season will take place in less than a month, concluding with the season finale at […]
Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day -- it's very good, I've seen it twice! -- follow. In the film, a significant moment hinges on Hulk recognising Peter Parker, and I've been trying to work out how that could be, barring any off-screen "I read about you in the Avengers files" business: In Infinity War, Banner meets Spider-Man before the latter goes into spaaaaaaaaace. In Endgame,
Things change on the old roads all the time, so it’s good to revisit them from time to time. Not long ago I went out to see a few key places on the National Road in western Indiana. One of them was the Walker Motel, in Putnam County. Here’s what it looked like when I photographed it in 2009. Despite the sign’s peeling paint, this place looked to be reasonably well kept. In particular, the hanging plants under the eaves suggested that someone cared. I can’t easily find information about when…
Every once in awhile, I fall into a deep, existential panic over the concept of moral luck.Moral luck, per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control." It presses against a very common intuition, which is that we should not be held accountable for things that we did not choose or which are out of our control…
yesterday i sent my first ever postcrossing little postcard and letter! it felt like such a rush, to be honest. last weekend i've been just sitting there, missing the feeling of writing a letter, when i remembered postcrossing exists, and i immediately ran there to sign up and get my first recipient. i got to pick out a card out of my collection and wrote up a small letter to accompany it, then in a couple days hurried to the post office to send it out. it made me so happy, and i'm hoping it…
Wisdom is a strange thing. The Wisdom Paradox is this: when we realise we are less wise than we thought, we become wiser. […] Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. The naivety of youth is a lovely thing. As a teenager, you can be sure that the grown-ups are doing it all wrong, and the path to better is obvious. Then, as an adult, it somehow seems more difficult than before. Some 20 years ago I became familiar with this principle, and it’s beautiful.…
Erling Haaland, the cool Norwegian soccer player, has a pretty fun and slightly unhinged social media presence. During the World Cup, a clip from his Instagram account resurfaced where he claimed, “Just raw dogged a 7 hour flight. No phone, no sleep, no water, no food. Only map. #easy” I have a confession: I, too, fly like this. Not for 7 hours, because I do sleep or watch a movie on a transatlantic flight, and yes I drink water, because hydration is important, ok? But I love the airplane map,…
Follow up from this post - I just signed into my Vinted account (to delete it) and it didn't send me an MFA SMS so how the fuck is me giving them my number securing my account in any way? The internet is fucked. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant!
Brilliant. I'm such a "valued customer" that they couldn't even be arsed to put my name in the email. Why is it even necessary to have a "business intelligence database" with a 3rd party? I ordered a fucking laptop. Can a tech company not create their own customer database? Full email here - https://cdn.kevquirk.com/framework-breach-email.pdf Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
Very busy along Gardiner Road with traffic leaving Monash Uni and traffic entering the pub, complete with mobs of pedestrians blithely ignoring traffic and stepping straight in front of me. Dodg’em cars around the drivers parking on and driving across the bike path, then blissfully empty further down the hill and towards the creek …so who forgot to charge the headlight on Tuesday after getting home. “Nah, she’ll be right …” It was alright, for the first half of the ride home.
I love climbing and bouldering. Like, an inordinate amount, and it would not be a stretch to say that climbing has changed my life for the better since beginning this journey in 2019, as my climbing addicted friend and I walked the University of Canberra campus trying to find rocks and/or stairs and/or weird parts of walls to pull on (shoutout to Pearce for introducing me to this world!). I'm 36 now and that means it's been more than 15 years, of varying levels and volume, climbing my little…
I love guest posts about people’s relationships to their bodies, especially when those bodies are changing and there’s this burst of new discovery. Even better when those discoveries are hot and full of joy. So I’m especially delighted to welcome this week’s guest blogger – she’s here to share a gorgeous story that combines exquisite […] The post Guest blog: Newly becunted – sex and healing after vaginoplasty appeared first on Girl on the Net.
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“Motown was about music for all people – white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone. ” — Berry Gordy, Jr. Last weekend we had the opportunity to take in the ‘Magic of Motown’, a combination history lesson and music concert. Think The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, The Commodores, The Jackson Five. It’s hard to conjure up an image of a Motown tune without waxing nostalgic… humming a few bars,…
Python A-Z is a blog series about Python. Each day, I share insights, ideas and examples for different parts of Python development that match with the letter of the day. Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month. Programming languages have many ways to combine literal strings and variables. For a decade now, we in Python land have been able to enjoy the beauty and elegance of f-strings. f-string is a string that is prefixed…
This week I really enjoyed the podcast about compression (The Hutter Prize) and the one about seashells. Quote of the Week “The thing about the future is that it keeps happening without you.” Normal Warren Ellis Leadership Board Meetings: Your Notetaker Is Not Welcome Here - this might be true for more meetings.
Welcome to Friday! A chance to reflect back on a busy week, two narrow gauge train trips and a few project updates. You know the routine now, so if the kettle isn’t on, give yourselves a minute to sort that before we start…Sunday seems a long time ago now - but it is where we start this morning. A lovely trip on the Corris - somewhere I’ve not visited for some time. It appears not much has changed and that is good with me - as the size, character, warmth and friendliness of this little railway…
2024 fantasy, linked to the Uncertain Sanctuary series. Raisa is a lawyer who gets tapped as the advocate for a newly-discovered alien species. By the time she gets to the world, one of them has been killed…
I left Twitter before it became X. Not in some grand, principled exit — no manifesto post, no “see you on Mastodon” farewell thread. I just quietly stopped opening the app one day, and never really went back. By the time Elon Musk’s name was on the masthead, I was already gone. So when people ask if I miss “old Twitter,” I have to clarify: I don’t miss what it became right before the sale. I miss what it was years before that — a smaller, weirder, more sincere place.
One Night Only (2026) • View trailer3.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for frequent profanity, sexual candor and surprisingly little nudityAvailable via: Movie theatersBy Derrick BangAlthough one first must accept this film’s ridiculously unlikely premise, what follows is an unexpectedly delightful romantic comedy, highlighted by Travis Braun’s continuously cheeky script and two stars who share a Periodic Table’s worth of chemistry. Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner) bump into each…
Duncan Rawlinson created this image using artificial intelligence, blending digital techniques with a contemporary art approach. A column of deep red descends through a narrow passage flanked by textured walls of dense green and blue. Midway through its fall, the flow encounters a jutting form of bright orange that splits the column into two braided streams, which reunite below around a wedge of cool blue. A sliver of yellow and violet punctuates the orange obstruction. The composition centers…
"A Dry, Quiet War" is a 1996 science fiction novelette by Tony Daniel. It is about a hero from the war at the end of time who returns to his home planet only to find more trouble. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "A Dry, Quiet War" follows Henry Bone, a man who for the past fifteen years has been serving in a future war - a big one at the end of time itself. He returns to his ranch on the planet Ferro and tries to start up a normal life once again. He begins distilling whiskey, and slowly…
2012 RingZero Game Studios Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Nintendo Wii Founded in 1997, RingZero Game Studios is a game development company based in Thailand . The studio is often known for making casual and family-friendly games on iOS, the Wii, and the PSP. Back in the PS3 era, however, they attempted to break away from their usual mould by thinking bigger. That opportunity arose when they began work on a mysterious game known as Shutter Jack. Information about this game is scarce,…
The best thing that happened this week This week has been all about wrapping up the last bits of work before I head out for a one-week holiday. It's always very hectic to get everything done, because there's no pushing things to next week. But I'm 99% of the way there now and it's nice knowing I left things nice and tidy for the team. After a lot of waffling and research, this week we took delivery of our new treadmill. We went for the Flow Fitness Runner DTM400i and so far it looks like a…
