Recollections from an Author’s First Year Though it pains me somewhat to acknowledge the fact, my début book, Why Q Needs U, was released into the wild one year ago. I’m certainly keen to celebrate the book’s first birthday, but also feel some reluctance at broadcasting this milestone, lest I fully fathom with the passing of time, and accidentally alert bookshops to an interloper in the ‘New Non-fiction’ section. The book’s official publication date in the UK was set for October 2nd 2025. Yet,…

From VR Optician: You can now order our Valve Steam Frame prescription inserts. We expect high demand at launch. The shop shows an estimated production time based on our current backlog before you place your order. I ordered some instantly, as this seems the best place in Europe to get prescription inserts for the Steam Frame. I usually don't wear glasses, because I only have a mild astigmatism in my left eye. Normally, the right one compensates well enough, but in VR the blur becomes much more…

[Birds are so weird, and it’s great.] Apparently, Brazil is full of very loud birds, and UMass biologist Jeff Podos has been studying them. The white bellbird is one of a trio of very loud birds, and it’s currently considered the “World’s Loudest” by no less an authority than Guinness World Records. Here’s how the bird is described. …sounds like a smoke detector that needs a new battery and attracts mates by screaming in their faces… Gosh, that’s sexy.Link:…

Thanks so much to Matthew Mastin! I wrote about the band Spalding’s Grey not too long ago after discovering their music on Youtube. It was a total mystery to me. It sounded like it was from the 80s. It sounded British. To my very big surprise the band was contemporary, current. And it was based in the U.S. and to top it all, it was just one person behind it. But that was not all. I knew Matthew. We had emailed many times thanks to Cloudberry Records and our love for indiepop music. We had…

At the recent UN meeting, a resolution was passed to recommend an "Equal Earth" map projection to replace the ubiquitous "Mercator" map projection (link). The Guardian shows us the two maps side by side:The left-hand-side map looks familiar while the right-hand-side map looks elongated with the African continent "blown up" while Europe, and especially U.K., looks shrunken.The argument for adopting the "Equal Earth" map on the right is that it preserves areas, i.e. the map does not distort the…

The Log has a guest post by Jean Charconnet about the use of analogy in discourse; here’s the beginning: Thirty years ago I defended a doctoral thesis on analogy, later published as « Analogie et logique naturelle » (Peter Lang, 2003), with a preface by Grize himself. It was built on the framework of natural logic Grize developed across a series of books, most fully in « Logique naturelle et communications » (PUF, 1996) — the study of how ordinary discourse builds meaning through a small set of…

As everyone knows, the USA is drastically affecting just about everything with regards to the global economy. Inflation and with it the "normal" response from the Bank of Canada will be to raise interest rates. However, I don't think that is the right thing to do, because the way that raising the base interest rate affects inflation is to "reduces demand for goods and services". It's not consumer demand The inflation that we are all experiencing in 2026 is not consumer demand though, its the…

Brad is walking in Memphis this week for the podcastathon so we recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the incentives we're both offering for St Jude and the work that goes into those as well as my progress as an "artist", and Jimothy. Then we discussed finishing notebooks and inks, and finished off with my analog defaults. There's still a few days to donate to St Jude. Listen to The Pen Addict 736: I’ll Keep You All Knight

Today, October 1, is World Postcard Day! I am going to copy Renkon’s post and say that if we interact with each other a bit on The Internet, most likely mutuals on some social media platform, and you would like a postcard, let me know! You should know where to contact me through email, social media, or Discord, and I will send you a postcard from my collection. I can’t guarantee it will be a great one, it might be some silly touristy thing, but you will receive one.

Organisations with successful products need to rethink their SDLC

Writing under the shared pseudonym "Kelley Roos," William and Audrey Roos formed one of the best, cleverest and funniest writing duos of genuinely funny, cleverly-plotted detective novels starring their bantering, mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy – who appeared in eight novels and a dozen, mostly uncollected, novellas. The first seven novels were published between 1940 and 1949 with a surprising, final entry being published in 1966. And of the dozen, or so, novellas only three were…

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)The Profolio Oasis Notebooks are fantastic in their most basic form, and this National Parks series elevates them even above that high mark. The combination grid-dot-lined paper is unique to Profolio notebooks, and it works as a lined journal, or a grid notebook, or dotted. Whether you need vertical or…

It sucked. I lost my friend Rob, and it sucked. It still sucks. I miss him. While that was the thing that overshadowed everything else, it wasn’t all that happened because life goes on… The start of September means the start of school, and the kid is now officially in 1st grade! Of course there’s been like 3 fundraisers already, and multiple school events to attend… and it’s only the first month. The timing of the start of school and labor day means that I missed Reapercon again this year. I…

It's October, bakers.You know what that means.BRING ON THE HALLOWEEN CAKES!! Aw yeeeeah. This is gonna be good. YASSSS Is that a ghost being electrocuted?BECAUSE I LIKE IT. Er... I mean... Sure! Yeah! Keep 'em coming! Wait, what...? Why? Is that a nipple what is happening stop it Thanks to E.L., Jack, Crickie, Alacia, Jennifer C., Tina S., Lorinda R., & Igor V. for the reminder that something wrecky this way comes. Actually, a lot of somethings. And I, for one, CAN'T WAIT.…

2026-10-01Hello! It's October now.I wonder if I should have skipped this photograph today. It's foolish to be standing in the middle of a busy road (even though I was safe in the median) and I don't want any photograph of mine to become imitable behavior.Even still, the coloring isn't great and I don't think my attempts in editing made it any better. I was attempting at hand-recreating the common Instagram filters and presets I see being passed around. It was worth a try, but there's a lot more…

How to load .env variables into Bash, using a one-liner. Or three...

“The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”” (James Clear, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds) I try to remind myself of this often. Software engineers are always squabbling over the “right” approach, and more often than not there is an emotional attachment. I also try to think of this in reverse, such…

A couple of months ago, I released a converter that would calculate Into the Oddish enemy stats for any Pokémon based on their game stats. This has seemed to be useful (for instance, the Blog of Forlorn Encystment put out an entire monster manual of the first 151 Pokémon with complete movesets and Toasted Bagel went ahead and converted stats for every single Pokémon). However, it raised an inevitable question: how do I create playable Pokémon? Because Into the Oddish has different rules for…

The farms were now safe, Lord of Feasts thwarted yet new threats were arriving. New people wandered into the forest seeking the hidden city. They claimed it was known that secret beauty dwelt within this dark forest. Though rumors were true, they could not describe the city’s full majesty. Lady of Rain’s folk, weak to flattery, allowed the strangers to stay. They granted them leave to freely explore and witness the many sights. The glorious trees and shimmering homes adorned with flowering…

Miss Manners fields a question about perfect, the latest word to get beaten to death from over-/misuse as a synonym for okay. I found the wording of the question unclear, but the situation made sense: The questioner, being in charge of bookings for a client, ended up double-booking because the way many people use perfect could mean book it or okay, thanks in such a context.I appreciate Miss Manners's commiseration, especially as I, too found amazing and awesome annoying in their heydays, but I…

Happy Spooky Season! Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by sending me an email: rss@thomasrigby.com.

📷 245/365 - Let the light in. Giving Halide another go, shooting in RAW and using the accompanying Photo Lab.

📷 247/365 - Let the light in. Giving Halide another go, shooting in RAW and using the accompanying Photo Lab.

Frogs and toads – collectively, the anurans – have been covered on numerous occasion across the history of Tetrapod Zoology though…. Caption: Mount Ballow mountain frog Philoria knowlesi, an east Australian species named in 2022 from the McPherson Ranges on the Queensland-New South Wales border. Named in honour of conservationist Ross Knowles, it’s endangered by habitat loss and deterioration, and potentially by frog-killing fungus. Image: Mahony et al. (2022), original here. …. as usual, the…

Heavily overcast skies prolong the lingering darkness till well past sunrise, but eventually the duetting screech owls and the all-night migrants softly calling from the woods’ edge fall silent, the crows disperse, and the wren, one imagines, must be off busying himself with matters of great import.

I was recently musing that a lot of people supported Trump because "he's a pugnacious shithead just like me." Liberals would smirk at that. They'd nod their heads ruefully. So true! But they support that sort of thing to their very core. After all, what screams Democratic Party more than a soft-focused video of a minority child entranced by a speech proclaiming in voiceover, "I want a president who looks like me!" Yeah! That's the stuff! Beautiful! Most people in this binary of binaries (well,…

A support ticket can contain a user’s name, a screenshot of an application, a configuration export, or notes from an incident. Copying the ticket into an AI assistant to get a quick summary may feel like routine support work. It also sends the client’s information to another service. The person who opened the ticket may have no idea that service is involved.Malwarebytes’ October 1 article on shadow AI uses an employee summarizing a long email thread to show how an ordinary shortcut can expose…

Google’s new arrangement for installing unverified apps on Android takes effect this Thursday (Oct. 1st) here in Brazil. Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand are also among the first countries to be affected. F-Droid and other free and/or Google-independent initiatives have been raising a ruckus over the changes. They are, indeed, an extra hurdle for apps distributed without Google’s blessing. Verifying an app means identifying yourself to Google, which — understandably — many developers don’t…

👌 Who comes up with ideas like this? So much fun to destroy a website. https://destroy.spritefusion.com/ Thanks @atog for sharing.

The warm air is fading from the wind the same as the memories from last year grow more distant, just like how the Earth moves away from the sun when winter comes around.New York City is about to see another season and I am about to undergo another change.I know. The world is a cyclical place. We have four seasons. We have our bouts. We have our moments of joy and pain. We have days in the sun, moments when it rains, and times when it snows.We have mornings when the ground thaws during the first…