I will readily admit that I know more French and Russian than CSS, and that’s fully with the knowledge that I recognize maybe 10 words of each language. CSS wasn’t a thing during the brief time that I spent learning HTML, so it has completely passed by me. Bearblog relies heavily upon CSS, meaning that any time I update my blog’s theme, I am treading gingerly as this code is in unknown territory. As I mentioned yesterday, I gave my blog a makeover and I’m largely satisfied with the results.…

I've created a list showing the 174 new elements within the October 2026 LEGO® sets, with links to which sets they come in, in case you wish to purchase.Set 21373 Downton Abbey supplies us with many options for minifigures, we get our first minifigure-scale LEGO® Pokémon creatures thanks to 72154 Iconic Trainer Moments Poké Ball, while the nostalgic 72306 PlayStation introduces two new round tiles with diameters of 1.5 and and 4 modules. You can read my review of LEGO Downton Abbey here.And…

Commodified Intelligence bastard web fonts Why the Bronze Age collapsed Why Isn’t The Industry Freaking Out About DeepSeek 4.1 Flash? Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB Withings protocol app Prompt injection in HTTP headers The Shadow of Existence Why does the universe expand? Taco Bell Programming Thirteen apps. One craft. Were we blue-collar workers all along? Edgar Allan Poe’s story that taught me about cryptography Push Ifs Up and Fors Down How much of a chart is data? We ported the…

The rugged shoreline of Otter Crest Beach at Otter Rock, Oregon. The post Over Otter Crest Beach appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I ran into money trouble as a uni student in the mid-2000s, and started selling most of what I’d taken with me to Adelaide at the time. One item was a DVD comedy special I’d bought on a whim, then immediately regretted after watching five minutes. I expect people have the same remorse after listing to a Rubenerd Show, which is available wherever you get your podcasts (cough). Anyway. The case and the disc were in near mint condition, on account of having barely been watched. So I took some…

From the splash page, Wanted Dead or Alive promises a lot and delivers very little. Spirit is indeed wanted, and apparently dead or alive, but the police manhunts never give him the slightest trouble. Not even when he breaks into the police station and kidnaps Dolan and the Mayor. Spirit’s very cocky this strip, and oddly self-destructive. He’s wanted because he’s broken a murder suspect out of jail. The murdered is a foreign general who is in exile in the United States because the Nazis took…

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica: Like Chromebooks, Googlebooks are guaranteed 10 years of software support. However, the latest Chromebook models won’t get that in the traditional way. Google’s support page says that it plans to continue ChromeOS support through “mid-2034,” so there are already devices with support windows beyond that. […] Rather than get into a Windows XP situation in which it had to keep extending update support, the support page says that Google intends to upgrade newer…

Visited the event at Concordia and saw the exhibition 'Plaviljoen: Cross Media Design'.

Psychedelic artist Peter Max died at the age of 88 on September 14, 2026, at the age of 88. In 2021, he had been diagnosed with advanced dementia.Peter Max was born Peter Max Finkelstein on October 19, 1937, in Berlin. His family fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai when he was still a baby. They lived there for ten years. They spent some time in Tibet before migrating to Haifa, Israel, where they lived for many years. They spent a few months in Paris before settling in New York City. Peter Max was…

Story #2 of 31: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 8, ed. by Neil Clarke Part of a series: Reading Science Fiction at 75. The first essay. “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” by Grace Chan was first published in Lightspeed (May 2002). You can read or listen to it online here. Calam sneaks away from Orin to handle unfinished business on the planet Zhenzhu. In this very short space opera noir, the plot features one action scene, with gory results. The story wraps up with a discussion about…

I'm convinced I am autistic. I've taken many online tests where I have scored highly on the Autismometer. Also, several family members' children have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum and all the things that they displayed growing up were things that also applied to me when I was a kid. Weird obsessions, stimming, poor social skills, inability to sleep, precociousness - stuff like that. I had 'em. I was a handful for my parents. One of the things I've always struggled with is social…

I feel like this security questionnaire is trolling me. Q: Are AS/400s used to process, store data or used for scoped services? A: We are not a hat factory in 1993.

Pictured above: Another one of my totally organic, AI-free, hand-drawn “back of a literal envelope” diagrams showing the “limit the blast radius” benefits of network segmentation and microsegmentation. Jack Poller, NetFoundry’s VP Product Marketing, kicked off a six-part microsegmentation series with the gap that nobody in the space likes to say out loud. An Omdia survey of 352 security decision-makers found that: 99% of organizations are implementing or planning microsegmentation, and only 9%…

'Winning AI' - I still don't know what that is supposed to mean. But I know I'm already tired of it.

Bild: Castrop-Rauxel, Kreuzung der Lothringen-Trasse mit der Bövinghauser Straße. Die Lothringen Trasse ist jetzt von der Harpener Straße in Bochum bis zur B235 in Castrop-Rauxel durchgehend befahrbar. Das Ende der Lothringen-Trasse an der B235. Ein Verkehrsschild ist noch verdeckt, weil noch eine Umleitungsstrecke in die Lothringer Straße führt. Danach wird die Einfahrt von der B235 für Kfz verboten. Die B235 heißt in Castrop Wittener Straße, in Dortmund Provinzialstraße und in Langendreer…

Note: This post contains serious spoilers for season 1 of Pluribus I was watching season 1 of Pluribus this past week, and I have to say that while it's a very odd, somewhat unstructured show, I was really fascinated by it, seeing it as a possible parable for any number of things. To be clear, this post isn't an endorsement of the show. It's... much to odd for me to just heartily recommend to people, but if you like quasi-apocalyptic, (maybe?) hard sci-fi minus space travel (with a bit of an…

Despite writing very little in here, I've got a lot to say. Books 📕 Intrigo a Tokyo (Keigo Higashino): To quote the previous comment I had on my Now page: "The author died recently and I thought I had this on my list but it was actually another book with a very similar title in the Italian translation: "Intrigo a Tokyo" by Hotate Shinkawa. These two books, namely "Crime in Tokyo" and "Intrigue in Tokyo", are originally named "Hakuchō to Kōmori" ("The Swan and the Bat", but titled "Guilt" in the…

Dr. Chiara Scissa, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Bologna Photo: 2026 forest fires in Fontainebleu, by Jdkxhdjj, via Wikimedia Commons New book: Disaster Displacement and International Protection in the EU. Challenges, Misconceptions, and the Way Forward (Routledge, 2026) Disasters trigger over three times more displacements than conflict and violence and rank among the principal drivers of displacement worldwide. Whereas other world’s regions have reached…

Einige Kreise by Wassily Kandinsky (1926; oil on canvas, 140.7 x 140.3 cm, Guggenheim, New York)

The other day I came downstairs for dinner and announced, "I still haven't gotten my writing done for the day," by which I meant my novel writing. After dinner I was going to have to go back upstairs and finish it.My partner said, "I should really treat guitar practice the way that you treat writing. You always know whether you've gotten your writing done. I play guitar when I'm in the mood for it, or when inspiration hits, but I should make a point to practice every day. I should keep a…

Alexander Calder, baby fork, 1946, 4 1/4 x 1 1/2 x 3/4 in., silver wire, at Rago Holy Moley, Calder baby fork. 14 Oct 2026 Lot 107: Untitled (Baby’s Fork), 1946, est. $7-9,000 [ragoarts][five minutes later update: people out here flipping the 80yo Calder baby fork after just two years]

America.gov may be the end of the Napoleonic model of government. As credit tightens and AI capex moves into harvesting, Matt Dines & I explore how an agentic government interface could reshape the citizen-state relationship.

Nancy Holt's photos of a tunnel, at different times of day. Helicopter view of the tunnels (frame from the video linked below) In the middle of nowhere, Utah, there are four concrete cylinders. It’s a Nancy Holt artwork. I’ve never been, but learned of it at the first UK retrospective of her work at the Goodwood Art Foundation.That work, Sun Tunnels, hasn’t been lifted to Sussex, or anything as dramatic as that. But there is photography, and a…

I’ve found that simple productivity techniques work best for me – the more complex the tool, the more likely they are to feel overwhelming and draining. The most helpful tools have been maintaining a simple to-do list daily and using the Pomodoro Technique (Wikipedia link) for short periods of focused work. I’ve experimented with different lengths of time for the work sessions. Some people have suggested 45-minute or 90-minutes intervals for deeper focus. However, I’ve found that 25-minute…

Euripides, fragment 610 (tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp): Get lost! You can do nothing—you can only talk. φθείρου· τὸ γὰρ δρᾶν οὐκ ἔχων λόγους ἔχεις.

I made a really nice image of my daughter earlier. It perfectly captures her stance towards homework: pure disdain, with a side of resignation. (Poor thing.) But since I'm not comfortable sharing too many images that feature my children as the main subject, you get popcorn instead. (If you want to see the image, you have to come by for a visit and have a look at the next year's book, which will 100% feature this image.)

Poem by Al-Mutanabbi (915–965), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 68: Tastier than old wine, sweeter than the passing of winecups is the play of swords and lances, the clash of armies at my command. To face death in battle is my life, for life is what fulfils the soul. Related post: A Stirrer-Up of Strife.

Why don’t students use AI-based tutor-bots? Holt calls this the 5% problem: only about five percent of Khan Academy students use the platform enough for gains to show up on standardized tests, and that five percent skews toward higher-income, higher-performing kids, who would have done fine anyway. Ben Riley, over at Cognitive Resonance, names a […] Source

I took targeted triceps work off the table today as they both still have a twinge in them. I’m still really sore from all the pull-ups earlier in the week, but I gotta burn off some stream. Unknown location (probably inside)

Disclaimer Previously… Rivals Conclusions The Bad The Weird Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything…