Seagulls are quiet birds, considered quite beneficial by agriculturists (they were credited with saving farmer's crops by consuming the insects endagering them). They are usually gentle creatures, exhibiting neither antagonism to not fondness for man.What interested Tom Wilson Weinberg about the seagulls was their behaviour or more precisely the behaviour of some seagulls : in response to a UC Irvine study of long term monogamous lesbian behaviour in seagulls on Santa Barbara Island, Tom Wilson…

I love old tractorsWhat's your favorite Navidrome client for macOS? Navibeat looks pretty good. I don't intend to self-host my email, but if I did, this might work: Stalwart Mail & Collaboration Server It's a close call between my frustration with tangled cables and my hatred of Bluetooth. ✍️ Reply by email

I started the month off with Product for the People in Bristol and the release of my chat with Russell about working in the open (though it seems to be the slight sidetrack into the importance of communities that people clicked with most) and finishing at the National Data Library. I covered all of that in Week 36 though. Since then I’ve been having a mini-sabbatical I suppose. It is a bit longer than a vacation but not as long as a career break . On the work front I am in the final paperwork…

Just two months ago, in “On Type Inference”, I explained why I prefer relying on implicit (inferred) types over the explicit ones as much as possible. Just a few weeks later I realized there’s one more thing: type refinements. Even today, I heard that “Array#filter is not type-safe” in a context of it not “removing” (refining!) undefined when used as .filter(Boolean).

thinking about what i want to do with this space! turns out all it takes is a little bit of decorating to make it feel like it's truly mine...oh...!

Our Krevborna campaign continued with a slightly diminished party, but that certainly didn't stop them from getting in over their heads.CharactersDario Diego Durant, swashbuckling swordsmanVarro, a young snow elf bearing a magical swordJohanna, lycan bard and fallen noble Imperious, a cambion adolescent with a big swordDoctor Anastasia Nadya Strahov, a gun-priestEventsThe party woke up in darkness with no memory of where they were and how they got there. They quickly determined that they were…

Happy Wednesday everyone, we kick off this week with a whole host of townsfolk from Kim for Guards of Traitor’s Toll. We cannot wait to see the whole town. Next up and Mark J has some WW2 Brits on the painting desk. Armed with a number of Piats these are destined for Arnhem. Speaking of which Mark has also got some more buildings painted up for that very town. Going a bit fantastical now and Stephen has a selection of horrors from Reaper miniatures to paint up. And lastly for this week Andy is…

WoolApple iPhone 17e2026 At the Indiana State Fair this year I wandered through the sheep building, to find that there was a little gift shop inside selling wool products. As best I could tell none of it was from Indiana, which I thought odd. But this display of wool yarn was colorful and framed well. Get more of my photography in your inbox or reader! Click here to subscribe.

Links of to interesting stuff elsewhere… The AI threat to independent student writing is not necessarily a threat to student learning — what’s needed, says Joe Cruz, are courses “in which ideas are expressed in real time and analytical thought unfolds as a debate or an oral defense or a group discussion”—and small enough classes to make that work Would you take a pill that allows you, with no ill health effects, to permanently forgo sleep? — Rebecca Lowe thinks you have no good reason not to,…

Better start to the morning today: Exercise followed by a chickpea scramble, together with cottage cheese mixed up with diced tomato and kalamata olives and a side of cucumber. Freshly-minted short story shipped off to Jared Shurin for his forthcoming edited issue of ParSec. The brief he sent me, a single image, was impossible to resist: More TIMES NEW HUMAN rewrites this morning, reserving the backend of the day for email and podcast notes. Inbox: 17, RSS: 5. #journal #work

These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy. A flurry of new papers has recently been published in open access: Baycan, 2026; Beaton, 2026; Milioni, 2024; Sager, 2021; Ujlaki, 2026. Naturally, some of them question the relevance of the critique of methodological nationalism to political philosophy. As I myself argued that nationalism is a cognitive bias (that is, a factor that systematically distorts judgements), let me explain why I believe it is a…

A long-standing lux.js bug left Event Timing on its 104 ms default, while browser releases improve testing and rendering performance.

In our current attention economy, everything needs to be bigger and flashier so if you follow any content creators or influencers in the smart home scene, you’ll see big and expensive setups that are fueling your FOMO. In reality, it’s the small things that bring most joy and actual utility. To counter balance that, I’m sharing two tiny adjustments I’ve made to my Home Assistant setup that have proved to be excellent quality of life improvements based on some new (as in, new to me)…

One inescapable conclusion I’ve had to draw observing our industry over the last couple of years is that the AI thing isn’t about productivity. If it was, teams would be looking for ways to improve outcomes. But that’s not what I’ve been seeing. I’ve seen dev teams setting out with the specific goal to use AI coding agents as much as possible, with the impact a secondary (or even a thirdary) concern. I’ve watched developers prompting Claude Code to rename classes or methods when there’s a…

Does Microsoft ever change? Learned today to install a UA switcher addon and switch to Edge for Windows and you get the new version of Teams with more background change/blur options on Edge for Linux

I read Mat​hia⁠s S​chäf⁠er’s excellent post, titled The death of web development education. I was thinking about how I can contribute to the conversation and really struggled to articulate the problem. The most effective way I can contribute, in my opinion, is a crude sketch I just did of Piccalilli‘s Stripe chart for all time sales: That’s a whopping 67.5% reduction since 2025… Pretty bleak, huh? Something really does have to change or you’ll miss publishers when they’re gone.

Broad-winged Hawks & Turkey Vultures in flight (cropped) from The Crossley ID Guide Raptors via Wikimedia 30 September 2026, WINGS at Veracruz: Day 2, Veracruz River of Raptors hawk watch plus shore and marsh hotspots On migration from North to South America raptors choose routes that require the least exertion. Avoiding open water they use thermals and tail winds for lift and push as they follow the edges of mountain ranges and coastlines. Inevitably there are geographic pinch points where…

The other week I was looking into some Docker shenanigans, specifically SOCI (Seekable OCI). In a nutshell, SOCI builds an index of the contents of your container image layers, so that a container can start before the whole image has been downloaded, and the files it needs are lazily fetched as they are accessed. (Spoiler: there will probably be an AWS Bites episode about SOCI soon, so stay tuned there if you are curious.) While reading about compressed layers, indexes and lazy loading, I…

If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else raise(SIGTRAP); #endif Every major C++ project reinvents this wheel. B...

A feature request that has been open since 2019 (#91 One Key Cut/Copy) asked for something the long dead CodeRush for Delphi (archive.org) used to offer: with nothing selected, Ctrl+C copies the identifier at the cursor and Ctrl+X cuts it. GExperts can do that now, and it can also do what Visual Studio does, copying or cutting the whole line instead. It is an option of the Editor Enhancements expert. Open the GExperts configuration, select Editor Enhancements and click Configure. The group…

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Much has been written about how this year's El Niño is already breaking records. Climate Dashboard's new interactive map lets you explore how this unusually strong El Niño could affect climate conditions around the world, including what it might mean for the weather where you live.El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in which unusually warm ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific disrupt atmospheric circulation, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns…

When I was a kid of about 10 or 12, a friend of mine had a copy of this game. I lusted after it so badly, mainly because of the little toy aeroplanes.Skip forward many, many years, and I found a copy second-hand, and bought it immediately. It is by no means a simulation of aerial combat in WW1. It is extremely simplistic. But it holds up better as a game than I really expected. I wouldn't play it in preference to an actual aerial wargame, but I wouldn't turn down a game as a moderately…

Sets (in the computering sense) are a useful thing, but they're a "new" (post-C) thing and so the syntax isn't standardised across languages the way it is for e.g. arrays. (In particular, they aren't available as standard in Perl, which has been my language of choice for many years.) So I thought I'd look at the way they work.

Akiko #5 Date: July(?) 1996 Publisher: Sirius Entertainment Cover Price: $2.50 2013 NM Price: $3.00 Stats: 22 black & white pages plus "Letters to Akiko" and one house ad Story & Art: Mark Crilley Notable Notes: Sea serpents and acid worms! Are You Scared Of Bugs? Do creepy-crawlies give you the creepy-crawlies? I am average when it comes to being squeamish, I guess. I don't usually freak out around bugs... but if you were to put a spider on me I might do the mad "get-it-off-me" dance! Here is…

Normally I’m bad at earnestly acknowledging that a thing I made is good, and would rather point to my next idea and talk about how that’s going to be better. Mythic flipped that on its head. It’s been out for over a year and I look back on it proudly, happy with what it does. I’ll say it: I think it’s pretty good!Which is a real pain when it comes to working on Intergalactic.There’s an element of “difficult second album” even though Mythic wasn’t my first game. Its success has brought new eyes…

Over the last week I was lucky enough to spend several days communing with science writers in Oregon. I love going different places and seeing how different things are. This time I particularly enjoyed the difference in vegetation – ferns and mossy rocks everywhere. I have a soft spot for lichens, and friends send me pictures on their travels, so here I am: sending you, friends, a picture from my travels. I see a lot of lichen around here in my East Coast home, but mostly they are pretty flat,…

You add a rule to a Vue application. It could go in the component’s <script setup>, a composable, or a Pinia action. All three can work. The harder decision is which dependencies that rule should have. A discount calculation should produce the same result whether a user clicks a button or an import script creates an order. A Snake collision should follow the same rules whether the player uses a keyboard or on-screen controls. Hexagonal architecture gives application rules their own boundary.…

Not entirely sure where most of 2026 has gone, but here we are – and about to hit October. Only feels like a few months ago I was preparing the Christmas updates. A slightly larger update this month, as we had a lot of contributions come through, including details of a surprising C64 conversion that likely never got far as part of 3 new entries added to the archive, then we have 12 updated entries, a Scooby and Scrappy Doo prototype added and finally 11 lost titles found. See you all next…