Sunny and still at mid-morning, with backlit leaves at the woods’ edge looking even yellower than they are. The throb of a distant engine. Squirrel teeth chiseling open a walnut. A common yellowthroat pipes up.

Sendgrid is bad at spending their marketing money

And Nissan huts – home for my family when they reached Australia (before my time, was exploring some in the Cantonment of Barrackpore recently though) Bardot with Marston Mats Mưa đỏ: Still more Marston Mats Marston Mats Tank Mats 1945 Mats Matty Mats One more on Marston Mats (perhaps my favourite so far because of the Melbourne Demons’ Keith “Bluey” Truscott link) More marston mats Elemental structures of memory: Marston Mats in Vietnam and beyond – preprint

Latest collection of essays.By David SedarisRating: 3.5 / 5.I’ve enjoyed reading Sedaris’s essays since a roommate turned me onto them in college, so I was eager to dive into these for reliable wit and laughs. While there were some hilarious and surprisingly touching moments in this latest book, I found myself less charmed than I have been reading past stories. I’m not sure whether that has more to say about me or these essays. Still, there were plenty of lines I delighted in and could hear him…

Productivity content is pretty fun. It’s really enjoyable to watch people build elaborate systems in which they can track absolutely every aspect of their lives, plan every day to the minute, and achieve their wildest dreams. At least, that’s what I used to think. Now, I think of myself as a recovering productivity enthusiast. I went deep into the pit and climbed out the other side. And now, when I see someone making content about their beautiful, elaborate productivity system, alarm bells…

Here’s a round-up of some news from the last couple of months. Mathematical discoveries Lerch primes are defined as odd primes that divide their Lerch quotients (obviously) and until now we only knew four of them existed. This month, Veljko Vranić has found the fifth Lerch prime: it’s 42,447,347, if you were wondering. (via the SeqFan mailing list) Ruslan Mizhaev has written about an octahedron of genus 3 which is equivelar (all vertices have the same degree and all faces the same number of…

I am sorry that the blogroll has disappeared. I had been meaning for some time to update it and strip out the dead links. When Astronony Picture of the Day changed its web address I decided I would at least update that one. So I did, and found that the entire list had gone. Some research suggested that WordPress has changed its policies so that you can’t put such a list as a widget on the sidebar if you are on a free plan. So my apologies if you found this list useful and are wondering what…

Michael writes about blogs disappearing due to rising costs in domains and I agree with him that this is an ongoing issue. My previous blog was available at antoniosantos.io and the primary reason I moved to this domain was the .io TLD renewal price increasing to over $51 dollars. That was just way too much to pay for a single domain when there are cheaper options available. I don't plan on renewing antoniosantos.io so unfortunately when the renweal period comes, that blog is disappearing. I…

It began with a bloom, Florissantia quilchenensis, its petals splayed across a creamy, beige-brown matrix like a fossilized whisper from a warmer world. This precious bloom was hard-earned. Covered in dust and sweat, I grinned and held this elusive beauty to the light to take in its exceptional preservation and dusty beauty!It was day three of my travels. I was hiking the hills around the

English actress Anna Madeley was a reader suggestion, but a timely one as I just

Continuing the theme of software fixes for hardware problems, here’s an essay I wrote in 2016 about a broken computer display that I “fixed” as a teenager, just because I wanted to play Civilization. It remains one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.#hacks #marcin wichary

Today marks a year since my little sister, Lisa, took her own life. She was 34. It was an overdose, but we don't know if it was an accident or suicide. We’ll never get an answer, yet I lean toward believing it was by choice. As grim as it sounds, picturing her with some control over the end brings me a small measure of peace. I still think about her every day, and I still get upset regularly. Especially when I've been to visit my nephew and I see the sadness in his eyes. At first I was angry at…

After a Linux Kernel update on Debian 12, rsnapshot ran into SSH transfer issues.

Hawkworld Humor Gallery

Another one for the Bestiary, this one with a Mothership stat block. Thanks to onslaught six for helping me edit this one! Miasmic fogOn the coldest autumn nights, a strange fog may roll through the valleys. Swirling grey and white, the impenetrably dense mist is indistinguishable from normal fog, except the faint smell of rot that precedes it. Coming in contact with flesh jolts the fog to life, whipping it to a tempest that tears through any exposed flesh in its path. There has been much…

A comment on another site coupled with the upcoming holiday buying season led to this “explainer.” SKU is the abbreviation for Stocking Keeping Units, a shorthand for the number of physically different boxes you might find at a retailer for a brand, or more importantly, a product line. The was a time when the camera makers were overly prolific with producing SKUs. You’d find Camera X body, Camera X + Y lens, Camera X + Z lens, Camera X + Y + Z lens, and more. These days, many camera makers have…

A few months ago I read the book by Geoffrey Cain “Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary” (Amazon or Audible). It was a book about a 12-year period in the life of Steve Jobs when he was “between Apple”, meaning he was just ousted from the company he founded… only later to have Apple buy his company and welcome him back. Turns out Steve Jobs learned a lot in that time and came back to his beloved company a changed man. As the founder of Nozbe and…

Prompt list for October's #writersCoffeeClub prompts. #WCC OCTOBER 2026 : ghosts DATES What are you hoping to achieve this month? Do you have plans for your next work yet? How do you feel about spoilers? How isolated are your characters in your current WIP? What haunts the narrative of your current work? What might an inattentive reader miss in your work? Does your editing process tend towards addition or reduction? Tell us about someone who supports you on the sidelines. How does your own…

On this day, twenty five years ago, I wrote my first journal entry on this website. Twenty five years! A quarter of a century! That’s a significant portion of the lifetime of the World Wide Web itself. Actually, this site did exist before September 30th, 2001 but it was very different. You can still look at the very first version of adactio.com if you want to wallow in the glory days of framesets and DHTML. But it was twenty five years ago that I started publishing my thoughts here, making…

A brief post to note two reports that just came out: The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AGMAI) has posted its general recommendations to AI companies with regards to generation of solutions to mathematical problems. A working group report “AI and TCS: The Next Six Months” arising from a two-day event at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

The Filippo Loreti Celestial Tourbillon is $850. That’s the main story here. For the uninitiated, a tourbillon is an antiquated and complex mechanism designed by Abraham-Louis Breguet and patented in… The post Filippo Loreti Celestial Tourbillon appeared first on The Time Bum.

The DitchI am angry. Beneath the anger is a grief I haven’t yet let myself feel, but the anger came first and it hasn’t left.A neighbour has set out poison in the ditch where a skunk lives.Consider the facts. His property is large, and the ditch lies at its far edge, well away from his house. He never walks there. His car sits nowhere near it. He has no dogs, no cats, nothing that might blunder into a skunk and come home reeking. And the skunk rarely sprays; more on why later. The animal asked…

James Dean in East of Eden (1955) Vitals James Dean as Caleb “Cal” Trask, angsty and entrepreneurial farmer’s son Monterey to Salinas, California, Spring 1917 Film: East of Eden Release Date: March 9, 1955 Director: Elia Kazan Costume Designer: Anna Hill Johnstone Background Despite his profoundly lasting cultural impact as a 1950s screen and style icon, James Dean only starred in three credited films before his death 71 years ago today on September 30, 1955. Of these, Elia Kazan’s adaptation…

We are super close to hitting our goal for St. Jude this month, so it’s time to UNLOAD ALL THE GIVEAWAYS to push us across the finish line!This giveaway is for both pens in the Retro 51 Fruit Series, Banana and Strawberry. And Retro 51 included matching Rickshaw pen sleeves for both. AND Retro 51 sent me two sets of everything, so there will be TWO winners of this giveaway. Whew! Big thanks to Retro 51 for sending over all of these goods to help us raise money for St. Jude.One note: this, and…

Session 331 was played on 8/9/26Morgana, wizard 10 (Rob)Borumar, Triton Thief 11 (Josh)Blotto, Goblin Fighter 8 (Lanse)Nick, Fighter 8 (Me)Koltic, Cleric 9 (Cindy)Aroon, Fighter 8 (NPC)Jameth, Fighter 8 (NPC)Lor’Koth, Dwarf 8 (NPC)Moving on past the smouldering bodies of the plated apes, the party heads into the strange chambers on the edge of the map. First up into a room filled with pillars topped with lenses, and a door that repels any attempt to go near it. Many attempts are made. Lor’Koth…

::Snooty British Narrator Voice:: "Here, in the blinding flash of our hidden wildlife cameras, we behold a truly majestic moment." [...] [...] [trumpet-like fart blast]***"Her prey captured, the Snoot-Tusked Vander Hooper must now remain here, fangs embedded in the forest floor, until help arrives." ::contemplative chewing sounds:: *****"Their mating call may seem unusual - even bizarre - but the Ball-Footed Duck Dong swears this works with the ladies." "Hey girl, you up?" Thanks to Joel N.,…

As noted in my previous report, I am currently working on the open source Rust toolchain as a Sovereign Tech Fellow. Every two months, I’m putting out a report of my open source work done in that period. This is the second installment of this series. Same as the last time, I’ll try to pick a few highlights, summarize the rest of the stuff that I worked on, and also provide contribution statistics and a raw list of opened PRs. This post details my open source Rust work done in August and…

2026-09-30Hello!If I had not insisted on experimenting with this photo, I might have thrown it out. And now, it's one of my favorite images.Hanging in my room is a bit of watercolor artwork that I purchased on the used market. It combines streaks and splotches of color on a white canvas, and it has levels of detail and texture that I can't understand. These splotches of colors in a photograph remind me of it, and I love it.By inverting the colors in post processing, I can take a simple snapshot…