As a kid playing RPGs, I learned a lot of new words — some invented for a particular game’s fictional setting but others drawn from the real world. In a sense, the seeds for this blog were planted during the process of finding out if a given word existed outside the realm of video games. If it did, I always wanted to share — like, “Look, mom, a non-educational video game taught me something!” Indeed, this post began years ago with a trip to the dictionary that ultimately led me to Paracelsus,…

Welcome to October! September felt very busy, but went by quickly. Strange how that happens. Tabitha and I made pens. Was pretty cool but I already have a few Kaweco Sports so don't really need another one! If it's glow-in-the-dark, I'm going to be there though. I'm currently borrowing a Hasselblad X2D-II. It's an amazing piece of kit, and I'm a bit addicted to the X-Pan aspect ratio, but I'm also scared to bring it anywhere in case I cause even slight damage to it. It's quite slow to operate,…

I spent some time kicking the tires with my @openai.com Dot today. It was a brutal onboarding experience. Maybe I'm holding it wrong?

Happy October!It's time for a close look at the many good things coming this month on Turner Classic Movies.Myrna Loy is the October Star of the Month. A whopping 56 Loy films will be shown every Monday this month, in both the daytime and prime time hours.A separate post listing the complete Star of the Month schedule, featuring many film review links, will be posted here this weekend.The October Noir Alley titles are LOOPHOLE (1954), which is a TCM premiere, plus CRIME WAVE (1954), CHICAGO…

Between the cold breath of morning outdoor zazen and the warmth of evening hojicha, summer slowly fades. Photos taken with Nintendo DSi Comment via guestbook.

Opus 5.5 launched last week, and since then, people have posted a ton of product launch videos. The technology is superb because creating all those graphic animations by hand would have taken weeks.But there is a problem.If everyone can make launch videos, then launch videos start to lose their meaning. They stop being effective.Scroll through your feed, and you’ll notice that almost everything is just look same. It all looks the same because it’s becoming easier and easier to produce marketing…

Reading is also associated with better well-being and slower cognitive decline in older adults. Credit: Pexels. Source Fiction gives people tools to navigate the social world and find meaning in life, and research suggests that it may also help extend their lives. Among more than 3,500 older adults in a nationally representative U.S. sample, those who read books survived 23 months longer than nonreaders, measured when 20% of each group had died. The association was much stronger for books than…

Brain Baking recently posted a piece in which he admitted no longer being able to not eat meat. His children won’t eat what he serves them, and this can’t be a hill for him to die on. It sounds like a problem that any parent has, but he has taken his readers with him on his parenting journey for some time now, and to me, it feels like he is all but drowning. It’s not what he writes. It is his tone that makes his frustration tangible. I think it is extremely brave of him to write this down for…

On our recent trip to Strasbourg we found a pub we liked so much we visited twice. Strasbourg was the last substantial stop on our trip last month. We last visited in 2013 and, this time, spent a couple of nights in one of the capitals of the European Union. Most of our observations from that previous trip still hold; there has not been a total change in the beer culture in this part of the world in the past decade. Still, there are a couple of brewpubs that have opened since we last visited.…

This month seems like it just won’t end. So we were using the upstairs bathroom, and guess what we noticed: a leak. It was big enough to leak on our boxes that we hadn’t fully unpacked yet, and some that were still sealed. The ceiling was leaking in more than one spot. We made another appointment, this time to have a plumber come out and take a look. A few days later, they opened up the pipes and noticed they were almost completely clogged. Lovely. They informed us that they would need to…

Life We had a firebreak week at work in which I decided to go for an AI detox and refreshed my memory on web components. I actually think I learnt quite a lot and was having fun writing code and figuring stuff out. Then the futility of the whole operation hit home and the crushing reality of Claude life hit home. Anyway, software development (and frontend in particular) feels like it’s on life. support, and I’m starting to worry increasingly about my (total lack of) exit strategy. And even if I…

It has been quite a varied month in terms of blog posts. Alongside the usual book reviews, I have posted a ranked list for the 26 Elizabeth Ferrars novels that I have read so far, as well as three reviews for mystery themed puzzles and games.

There's something wonderfully comforting about a good sausage casserole - the kind that fills the kitchen with cozy aromas and brings everyone to the table with a smile. This recipe is one of those simple, homestyle dishes that feels just like a warm hug.Tender meaty sausages, a rich savoury gravy, and familiar flavours come together in a way that's simple and deeply satisfying. It's easy to make, uses everyday ingredients, and delivers the kind of hearty, feel-good meal we all crave when the…

20 things we learnt from TfL FoI requests in September 2026 1) Since Superloop routes were introduced, the most used is the SL8 (22.7m passengers) followed by the SL9 (12.7m) and SL7 (10.5m). Already twice as many people have ridden the SL11 (2.2m, introduced January 2026) than have ridden the SL6 (1.1m, introduced July 2023). 2) The estimated final cost for Ickenham's new disabled car park is £1.88m. This is 25% higher than the estimate given in an FoI response a year ago. It equates to…

Ossoff is Raising Money for OTHER Democrats It is not uncommon for politicians to raise money for other candidates—but not when they themselves are up for reelection. After all, your own reelection takes priority. It does happen occasionally, though, under special circumstances. Most commonly, that happens when the politiician is not on the ballot this year and is planning to retire rather than run again. See next item for an example. Click here for full story

And September's gone too. The end of summer, the onion festival in Cannara, shorter days, some SEO work, a few tests on Reddit and new agents in Atlas. Slow work first Most of my September log is SEO, on two sites: optimizing the pages that were already there, and adding new ones for searches the sites didn't cover yet. I found some directories (I know, directories...) with dofollow links and good DR and I just jumped in. It's a slow task and it needs time; I developed a new Atlas feature to…

I don't speak at conferences very often, but I have a handful of "stable talks" that I've been presenting on and off for years, mostly around CSS and JavaScript. This article is a recap of the conferences I attended this year and the ones that still remain.

While I remain focused on finishing the second edition of Thousand Suns – hence my continued absence from posting here regularly – I was nevertheless determined that I would not forget to commemorate the birthday of Dave Arneson this year, as I have too often in the past. Rather than rehearse why I keep erring in this particular fashion, I thought it might instead be more fruitful to look at just one of the many reasons that Arneson deserves to be remembered not only on this, the 79th…

Dawson Creek has been a wonderful project. A narrow gauge model unlike so many others with space to breathe and a believable whimsy, a caricature with the all important essence of character…The commission was described in words and photos on Monday - join me here for a more interactive tour through the project, learn about some of the ideas and techniques and watch some trains…I have made the now obligatory layout tour - and as a thank you to all of you who come here daily, I’m sharing it here…

Dennis Danielson and Christopher Graney are two of my favourite historians of astronomy. Danielson is the author of the excellent biography of George Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution (Walker & Company, 2006) and also The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining The Universe From Heraclitus To Hawking (Basic Books, 2001) which I don’t own but which I look at sideways from time to time and think, “that could fill a space on…

An excerpt of the "Liber Pontificalis" for Pope Adrian I related to Venice and doge Mauricius

Now that Tennessee has botched an execution, anyone want to bet that Trump calls for a return to hangings, or firing squads? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/tennessee-execution-halted-christa-pike

The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be…

Perfume PosseWomanity by Thierry Mugler Do you remember Posse? It’s 2010 and Mugler has been riding on its flankers game for a few years. Suddenly the buzz of a NEW Mugler perfume coming. The ads arrive in Aussie magazines long before bottles appear. International flight… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseWomanity by Thierry Mugler

Thursday 1st October 2026 Time for another delve into my inbox and feature some of the emails readers have been sending to busandtrainuser@gmail.com over the last month or so. But first something that dropped through my PostBox just a couple of days ago… Shrewsbury Area Bus Timetables … yes, it’s another Omnibus Society produced comprehensive timetable book and this time for the Shrewsbury area. It’s been compiled once again by Keith Shayshutt, together with Gary Nolan, and features every…

Here is my late entry for the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival for September! The theme was: Moonlight, hosted by James. We are always three I was told about the astral bodies in the sky, of how the darkness used to be full of dots of light. I don’t understand the stories, there is no sky outside. We are going to a new sun now, Dad says this one is younger, but still older than me! The other one was the moon, a big rock that shone at night, how can it be dark when there’s a light above? We used to be…

I’ve been posting a little recently about my experiences coding for the Pimoroni Presto, a microcontroller-powered device with a 4” screen, at 480×480 pixels. That makes it a square.Square displays are surprisingly rare, with the only exceptions being relatively small (either physically, in resolution, or both). As well as the 4” panel Pimoroni use, there are a handful of other screens like 1.3” 240×240 pixel Raspberry Pi hats and ESP32 widgets, but not much larger than that. There is…

★★☆☆☆ An extremely minimalist Gopher client for Android. I kind of like the text-based toolbar, though I had to experiment to figure out what each button does. ^S does search, settings, adding a page to bookmarks, etc. |^| shows your bookmarks @ lets you enter a new URL ^R reloads <- goes back a page in your history. (As with DeBurrow, the system back button closes the app.) Menu items are also displayed using text labels, which furthers the retro look and feel. Downloads get saved to the app’s…

Watching the sunset from a table along The Strand, the entire view of Hermosa Beach is refracted in a wine glass, upside down of course. グラスの中の夕日 ストランド沿いのテーブルから夕日を眺めていると、ハーモサビーチの景色全体がワイングラスの中に映り込む。もちろん、逆さまに。

Lots of making going on in November's issue of BRM. I start with some etched metal nettles. Very nice, but definitely a foreground plant, as they aren't cheap. That said, when only the best will do, this is a very good option. Very easy to use too. Next, a seriously time-consuming model. MMR Models GWR station is a stunner - but be prepared to put the time in. Nothing is difficult, but there are a lot of parts, and you really need to be pre-painting most of them too. Is it worth it? In my…