We can give Texas back for all I care. Let Mexico and the Native Americans pick their parcels. This place is a fundamentalist shithole. The Texas Senate race has everyone all hot and bothered. The core of the debate? The candidates’ preferred version of Jesus. Talarico is leaning into hippie Jesus, while Paxton is all about that supply-side Christ. Am I the only one who thinks this is fucking madness? We have very real and imminent issues to address, but instead my lawmakers want to argue about…

Let’s see if we can help out eBay and get some items sold https://listings.vandragt.com/

David Anthony Guaraldi, Vince’s first-born child and only son, passed away on September 24.He was only 71. Much too young. It’s safe to say, that without David’s help and enthusiasm early on, I likely never would have written his father’s biography. I owe David a lot. How that happened is a somewhat complicated story. Back in 1990, my wife and I learned about the existence of the Peanuts Collector Club (PCC), an international clan devoted to the work of Charles M. Schulz, and which thrives to…

Happy birthday to me! I'm currently vacationing in Greek islands, not really for my birthday but it does happen to include my birthday, the 47th one. Vacationing for my birthday is not really my thing. My birthday thing is more like this: After the red-eye flight, get up the next morning at 5:30am and take a taxi to the village of Marathon, Greece, and then run the original marathon course back to Athens, Greece. This wasn't some kind of epic achievement; people run this course all the time…

Below is a list of parkruns where the landowner has restrictions on dogs. This may be a 'dogs on leads at all time' policy or a complete ban. It is not a list of all parkruns that do not allow dogs.It is designed to help people that might be afraid or nervous of dogs.The Equality Act 2010 makes it a legal requirement for businesses to allow access for assistance dogs with only a few exceptions to this, so even with bans in place most venues may still legally have to allow assistance dogs…

I’ve fallen behind a bit on correspondence and other stuff recently, for the reason that I have an impinged shoulder at the moment, and have had for a few weeks, and it’s getting progressively worse. This means my entire right arm gets sore and stiff easily, and one of the things that exacerbates it is a long typing session. It’s not keeping me from typing (I mean, hello, obviously), but it does mean I take frequent rests of the activity. Thus, all the things I do which involve typing are…

Northern Flicker (female) Early fall might be my favorite time of year. For as much as I love summer, by late August, I almost always experience an end-of-summer malaise. And this year was no exception. By that time, the heat and high humidity have worn out their welcome, and the first signs of fall are […]

Morality is collective; we coordinate together to define and then enforce shared morals. Due to rising wealth and an explosion of fiction, the modern world is way into morality; even when other needs are sated, we still crave self-righteousness. The modern world has also greatly raised the status of education, and thus of abstraction. Combining these two, the modern world is very into abstracting morality; we celebrate intellectual systems that try to organize how we think about our moral…

Four-Square (Walk Through)I've been at Agile Cambridge today, at Churchill College in Cambridge. There's a Barbara Hepworth sculpture on the lawn. Four-Square (Walk Through), a piece from later in Hepworth's career and life, 1966. Big flat squares of bronze stacked into two cubes, each face with a circle cut out. You're meant to walk through it.The sculpture started small. Hepworth worked it up from smaller versions to a full-size plaster model on an aluminium armature, and the pieces were cast…

Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan, and Mike Isaac, New York Times: Here’s what Meta is doing: For tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centers as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are…

This guy made a digital version of his library of physical design books. It’s an interactive photo; you can click/tap on a spine for more information about the book in question.

There’s undoubted utility to a bag of holding, but I always imagine everything jumbling together like loose chicken parts. Magical tomes next to tavern dinners next to razor implements, sloshing around to produce a pulpy slurry. Designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich — best known for Point Salad and Verdant, although my course of choice would be the excellent TEN — Satchel Quest might be the first game to really understand the problem. This is a bag-builder only slightly…

This has been a pretty good year for the Weekend Hydrangea Team. Let’s check in on them. Florilegium Hydrangeæ This has been a pretty good year for the hydrangeas. Not as good as 2024 (see midsummer and later summer). But still, pretty good. First, it must be mentioned that the Weekend Host of Hostas put in a pretty good showing this year. They are shown here, in front of and throughout the Weekend Editrix’s garden, with their delicate purple flowers poking up on very long thin shoots,…

Since 2023, companies keep trying to buy the gems I publish, or to hire me under a contract that hands them all of it. I scambaited five of them to the end. The plan never changes: raise $10-20M, then buy someone else's decade of downloads for a few thousand.

22:05 - lost my balance walking home due to uneven pavement. Ended up sprawled on the floor, face first. Phone made a loud smack. Knees swollen. Elbow scraped. I'm currently resting. Was in such a good mood before. Now I don't wanna do anything.

You know what's a little bit sad to think to yourself? Wow, I'm a little bit jealous of how nice that person's Slack message looks And yet, that something I thought to myself last week 😅 I was looking at a colleague's message - which was posted to Slack via Claude - and it had the regular sort of rendered-Markdown that you'd expect from Slack, but inline in the message it had a pretty-rendered table, and a syntax-highlighted code snippet, followed by other bits of text. (Aside: I'm not really a…

A quick summary of upcoming bus service changes happening on Sunday October 4, 2026 and current consultation. Caroline SpringsFunded in the 2025 State budget, these are major service changes, including more frequent service, longer hours and reformed routes. New route 464 and the extended 463 replace the 461. Route 464 is notable in that it provides a direct east-west connection from Aintree to Watergardens. Previously this was a difficult trip involving a lot of switching between buses and…

Apply to be a guest on the pilot series of my new Podcast. Big Tech Seeking interviewees who want to talk about one of these (mostly American) tech companies: Google Sky Bet Ethical Capital Partners Suno AI Open AI Spotify Microsoft Netflix SpaceX Truth Social Seeking someone with an expert or critical eye on who’d like to update my critiques of them from my 2024 album Ctrl-Alt-Rap. I had 2 minute rap tracks, you’ll have a 15-30min conversation. vs. You You are likely either: a) An Expert…

Welcome back to Dispatch, a personal roundup of videos, records, and anything that I found interesting this month. Think of Dispatch as my monthly mixtape from the internet with no real theme except “this was neat.” This time we cover September but also some items from August when I didn’t dispatch 🥁 my roundup. Videos Quincy Sandbank published a video essay that on first glance seems to be about a classic 1991 Mercedes but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He talks about durability and…

I spotted this cow in my recon area a while ago. I always peek at while flying by, deployment after deployment. It had a child and they were wondering around some area, at 0 frontline at the daytime and sleeping at nights. I always think that the owner is missing them if alive. I also think if Lala from 12 Vartovyh (@ukr_ghosts on youtube) knew they are there she would run into there. These 2 hero girls evacuate animals from very shit places. I admire only 2 people: Keanu Reeves and her. I have…

It's late and suddenly I realize: I need to post an image! Did I take any today? I seriously forget sometimes. Turns out I did — a couple from waiting for the kids after school. The graffiti practice wall again. Meh… I don't like the images, but do I want to find something at home to photograph, right now? No. So, the above image it is. A successful day in general. Photographically, not at all. 👉 View one more image

I have been learning about investments lately and encountered a concept called rebalancing. Rebalancing means exchanging assets to achieve a target allocation. For instance, suppose you resolve to hold 80% of your investments in stock and 20% in bonds. If you buy assets in those proportions and let them grow, the stock is likely to outperform the bonds. Your mix might drift to something like 90/10, and you need to rebalance. In a typical investment portfolio, it’s not hard to figure out how to…

Someone's having a nice new lawn put in. I love a good spiral.192 words · 1 image

Globs sort filenames character by character, so numbered files often come out in a surprising order, with 10 before 2. Zsh has a neat fix for this: the n glob qualifier, which applies a “natural” sort, treating any run of digits as a number rather than a string of characters. I found this feature useful when building a PDF from multiple files.n I exported my multi-page document from Inkscape to one PNG per page, named Page 1.png, Page 2.png, and so on. I then stitched them into a single PDF…

Met someone attending OpenAI's DevDay 2026 yesterday and who, after friendly, knowledgeable (and intriguing) conversation, gave me a GPT-Pro subscription — free for a month, and worth $100. It was intended for one of his team members but he felt I could put it to more worthwhile use somehow. Was astonished at this vote of confidence for a random person one just met. I also guessed he had enough of these Promos to give around. Thanks, E! So thoughtful and gracious of you to gift me with this.…

Watch more of my art + sign up via https://art.justadandak.com/ A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls in the past month (which I added to my Tumblr although for a few weeks it was terminated so not everything appeared there) for your eyes / ears / brain to spend time on (as no longer active on Twitter or on LinkedIn much). READ “Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an…

I am very privileged to have grown up in Finland and I wouldn't change it for the world, but one thing I "regret" about not being born in the UK is that I would have loved to have been here as a young music nerds as all the incredible artists I was falling in love with were releasing singles. I've made it very clear in all my posts here and elsewhere that CD singles are one of my favourite formats, and the 90s and 2000s were a true golden period for them, each bite-sized selection of songs…

“The Honor Magic 9 Pro Max launches in China on September 28 with a directional “shotgun” microphone, ARRI cinema color, and a lens mount that takes a 500mm teleconverter. If you shoot video on your phone, the mic may matter more than its two 200MP cameras, and it hints at where flagships go next.” Very interesting, as my last few phone decisions rested very much around the camera abilities. Most of the other stuff is pretty much the same, or there is enough of it anyway. A 200MP 1/1.28-inch…