Note: this is the pre-depature post for my walk across Toronto. You can follow the first half of the walk here and read what happened in the second half here. I’ve lived in Toronto for the past 27 years. I love being “in the street” and have obsessively walked Toronto’s streets, back alleys, side alleys, front alleys and ravines like some sort of territorial dog. So when I got the idea to cross all of Toronto on foot, it just made sense! I’ve been inspired by Craig Mod’s TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO, an…

18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year’s Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and “a more responsive and delightful experience”. Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks. Source: macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess What a glorious collection this is!

📷 245/365 - The morning sun really tried.

Hey, Bear. At the younger age I always dreamed about playing games freely on my retirement, so the plan was to nake enough money before that, get into Northern(but not too much) woods and play the games. When I was buying my first laptop, back to I dunno, 2018, I learned everything about them at the market, so I could both carrying it to the job and playing Witcher 3 with okay fps. I got the beautiful Asus Zenbook of that year, with 1050Ti and just 1.8kg weight. I also bought the Witcher on…

“Sokoban” is one of those words that represents both a game and a genre. The game came first, naturally, and a wave of clones and inspiration followed, leading to the adoption of the subgenre designation. A Sokoban game is a puzzle game in which you push objects within a grid, attempting to get them to designated spaces without locking yourself out of further moves, and this style of puzzle has made its way into other games that are not, on the whole, Sokoban-style: think about certain puzzles…

📷 246/365 - The morning sun really tried.

A few weeks ago I woke up anxious about a few things: a lack of clarity on a project I’m working on, the misfortune a friend recently experienced, an upcoming trip, general planetary vibes. But then while putting away the dishes, my finger glanced off the kitchen cabinet at just the right angle and a long splinter wedged under my fingernail, puncturing the nail bed. The pain was shocking, rippling up my hand and into the neighboring fingers. I could see the lance of bruise-colored material…

Pre-historic humans used spears and clubs to kill every species of megafauna that lived in South America during the Late Pleistocene. Scientists found compelling evidence at the Taima-Taima site in Venezuela that humans killed at least 5 species of megafauna there. Remains of notiomastodon (Notiomastodon platansis) were the most common butchered animal found here, but scientists also identified butchered remains of toxodon (probably mixotoxodon), macrauchenia, glossotherium, and glyptotherium…

Despite my tendency to wax poetic about revolutionary politics and the evils of free-market capitalism, I’m just another tool trying to get that bag. My hypocrisy knows no bounds, but at least I own it. I have a C&P exam today. I’m already on the dole, but even a 10% rating will put me at 100%. Permanent and Total. Set for life. I’ve spent years fighting the bureaucracy, and the finish line is in sight. I traded my youth and my sanity for this. Committed unspeakable acts against humanity.…

Big sky on Monday night. I have fresh herbs, so I’m making herb salts this week. I also have a bulb of black garlic so I can knock up a jar of black garlic butter for herself. Next up, making a jar of cold ginger tea. This is easy: take three or four inches of ginger, chop it up, juice a lemon, throw it all in a jug, pour a pint of boiling water over it, wait fifteen minutes, stir a couple of teaspoons of honey into it, strain, cool and jar. Right. I’m off to buy cheese. Will do this properly…

What do you use your smartwatch for? A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than telling the time, all she used were pretty much the step counter and contactless payments. He looked a bit crestfallen at his impromptu user-research participant and somewhat…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to reckon that splendor is a fruit, butter is better, and the opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhoodHi there! Two phrases stuck with me in the last 24 hours, and both made me rethink how I eat every day.The first: what grows together goes together. Tomatoes and basil, apples and cinnamon, whatever's in season sharing the same soil and the same weather. It's intuitive, isn't it? So when do we lose something by ignoring it? I think it's whenever…

Exact source unclear, but likely a US general it seems.

"Grok 4 is smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously. This is the smartest AI in the world.""[It's] better than PhD level in everything.""From the humanities to, like, languages, math, physics, engineering – pick anything. And we're talking about questions that it's never seen before... Grok 4 is smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously." -- Elon Musk Patrick Boyle recommended a video from the House of El in his latest post.…

I have been running my business for nearly six years, I do my best to be as professional and polite to everyone. I feel that it is a small world, be careful who you offend. Yet sometimes, business is inevitable that I ended up hurting someone's interest. As such, the number of haters grew as my business grows. Initially I get very upset that I have crossed someone. Then, I learned it is the cost of doing business. If I want to please everyone, I should just stay at home. Instead of getting…

If you play a sport with a lot of dynamic movement, quick starts, stops, direction changes, buy shoes that fit almost perfectly, even if they feel slightly tight in the store. A looser shoe feels more comfortable walking around the aisle. On the court or field, however, that same looseness costs blisters, chafed skins, and worse. I’ve learned this one painfully, more than once. It has a decent analogy for life too. The option that feels more uncomfortable up front can often be the one that…

Every so often, data on the home server gets dangerously close to how much storage is available on its disks. That’s when the disk rotation dance starts. First find the disk with the lowest price per GB ― ugh, is it just me or did those prices go up… I wonder why… Then, move the data around. The idea is to remove the oldest (and generally smallest) disk, and to move data from it to the next one in the conga line, so every mount point has more space than before. I leave some wiggle room to leave…

Anyone else have a bunch of blog post ideas sitting in drafts because you’re intimidated by how long you think each post needs to be?Welp,AYThis is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload

Bad Mouthing... so easy to do. I've been suffering a sore mouth (tooth or sinus related - does it really matter which?). Funds otherwise ear-marked - like repairing the car and a cracked phone screen. This is a pain in the pocket as well as the head. Rumi comes to my aid as he so often does, 'We are pain and what cures pain, both.' Ugh? What the f*ck does that really mean? I go on a story-hunt and find some old tales which have pained me for decades now surfacing as blaming and 'bad-mouthing'…

Developers who have worked with Apple’s SwiftUI framework have likely encountered the some keyword in the context of defining custom views, where it’s typically used to enable the generic View protocol to be referenced as a type when declaring a view’s body:struct ContentView: View { var body: some View { Text("Hello, world!") .padding() .foregroundStyle(.blue) .font(.headline) } }When using the some keyword, the compiler will infer the underlying concrete type that’s actually being returned,…

Via Newspapers.comSit back and enjoy what is probably the weirdest "letter to the editor" in history. “The Guardian,” November 30, 1976:Recent reports of peculiar events have reminded me of a mysterious experience I had in East Anglia a few years ago. I was teaching in a small village school and the caretaker's husband declared that he had seen strange orange lights in the school field as he walked the dog home at about 10.30 pm. Cynics suggested that he had seen more light ale than anything…

Poem by Abū al-ʻAtāhiyya (748–828), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 59: Your life is a sum of counted breaths. With each breath that passes a part of life is lost. That which gives life brings death every moment nearer, and your caravan is led by one who will not jest with you.

By StadtjaegerSelf PublishedGeneric/Universal"Low/Mid Levels" Something went quiet in Frostholm. The mining outpost stopped sending word weeks ago. Company says it’s the weather. Locals won’t go check. A mother’s paying good money to anyone willing to find her son — a scholar who went up chasing some old civilization and never came back. This thirty page adventure presents a small village investigation and a dev le in to a mine with about eight rooms, plus a couple of overland events before and…

Ask anyone of a certain age and disposition in the UK about Blackadder, and they will be able to trot off several facts. It was spread over four series, each in a different time, culminating in Blackadder Goes Forth, set at the height of the First World War. They might also add – although opinion on this is somewhat divided - that contrary to the law of diminishing return, each series was better than the last (and the first was bloody good to start with). What they sometimes overlook, of…

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them? First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up. That is why I try to renew domains for more…

Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (1980; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989), p. 3: Not Horace, but Juvenal (7.51-52: tenet insanabile multos / scribendi cacoethes). Drogin also misspelled insanabile as insanibile.

I read Rain Noe’s article “An Architectural-Scale Kintsugi Project” with some interest. Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with joints that deliberately contrast against the base material in appearance, leaving visible scars in the repair. Repair work (right) on Mishima ware hakeme-type tea bowl with kintsugi gold lacquer, 16th century, by Daderot Noe is using the term for a proposal to repair a badly damaged 257-year-old house in Virginia. It seems from his description that, prior…

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them? First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up. That is why I try to renew domains for more…

When I first saw the trailer for this show, I was all in: two women ‘of a certain age’ being the protagonists of an action adventure show with some comedic elements? Yes, PLEASE! I eventually binged all eight episodes, and while I liked it well enough, I had issues with a couple of aspects of the show. Beware: systemic emotional abuse of girls and women; fridge-ing the love interest; some nudity; some swearing; psychological torture on-screen. Spoilers ahead! ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ “Ride or Die” (2026)…