I miss the willingness of early iPhone apps to be a little ridiculous in a good way. The beer apps that turned the screen into a glass understood that the phone itself could be part of the fun. An app did not always have to justify its existence with another productivity promise.Cassette Player brings some of that feeling to the iPhone Duo. Jerry Munyoka Nkongolo’s Rafikki Studio has made a digital tape deck with a clear physical identity, then given that identity room to change with the phone.…

Tonight, I feel over the Moon. I just finished renovating a 30y old solar thermal installation that couldn't hold its glycol-mix anymore. It's been a 6 months project, with several interruptions including a few weeks of contracting and a couple of light but painful injuries on the project. I got to learn that one must always secure a ladder as to prevent it to slide at the worst moment, and I got to learn the name of what seems to be a large muscle that binds the femoral sockets through the…

I’m back in my old haunt of Hyde Park for tonight’s event at the Seminary Co-Op at 7pm. I may walk around and enjoy the campus. It, uhhhh, has changed since I first arrived here almost 40 years ago now. Tomorrow! I am in Ferndale, Michigan, for an event sponsored by Sidetrack Bookshop. Here is the ticketing information. If you’re in the Detroit metro area, come see me! — JS

Cover art for Star Wars Outlaws (various platforms, 2024). This review has been a long time coming. When I first saw the trailer for this game, I was instantly hooked: an open world Star Wars game? That looked fantastic? Count me IN. I started playing the game early 2026, two years after the initial release. By this time the game had received patches that fixed some release-date bugs that turned people off the game, and harmed its reputation to the point that any potential sequel was nixed1…

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (February 16, 1838; aetat. 20): In imagination I hie me to Greece as to enchanted ground. No storms vex her coasts, no clouds encircle her Helicon or Olympus, no tempests sweep the peaceful Tempe or ruffle the bosom of the placid Ægean; but always the beams of the summer's sun gleam along the entablature of the Acropolis, or are reflected through the mellow atmosphere from a thousand consecrated groves and fountains; always her seagirt isles are dallying with their…

I found out about this blogging event on social.lol (thanks Robert) This seems to be a fun way to introduce myself based off of a pre-selected set of questions/prompts that everyone participating in this blogging event gets. Anyway, here’s my entry. A photo Name or nickname My full name is Rajath Ramakrishna. Most of my friends call me Rajath. Some call me Raj. Almost everywhere on the internet my username is rrajath. I chose the same name as the domain name for the blog because my full name…

Salon magazine has been publishing on the World Wide Web as long as I have. I started my digital career mere weeks before Salon spooled up and became an early success in the fledgling industry of web media. Slate would follow a few months later, and the two of them carried the web-native publishing flag for many years, through numerous owners and umpteen changes to how people consume information online. Slate persists—I listen to one of their podcasts routinely—as did Salon, until today. It was…

Tomorrow is the next Bandcamp Friday, so I thought I'd share some recent jazz and jazz-adjacent music finds. Frogs In A Pond by Surprise Chef – released yesterday 23 Oct 2026, this latest album from this Australian band offers chill jazz/funk/soul vibes and should be experienced from start to finish. It will take you on a journey. Paranova by Cujo – released 2 Oct 2026, this jazzy trip hop project by renowned electronic artist Amon Tobin will have you bobbing your head, tapping your foot, and…

The bigger folly than trying to understand what an artist is doing is trying to understand what an artist is doing now. It’s a fool’s game, and apparently, I am here for it. When I started looking at the stick figures motif in Jasper Johns’s work in 2024, and into 2025, it was driven by the busy little guys’ appearance in a series of prints that were shown in 2024, and 2023, but which were based on drawings from 2019, which were shown in 2021. Which may have been peak little guys. Point is, it…

Or, why the universe is probably full of brilliant people nobody has heard of Most people believe a successful career progresses linearly. You get the job, you land the promotion, you ship the thing, you make partner, you exit. One big bang, and then the light of your reputation travels outward forever. This is why so many talented people stare at the night sky of LinkedIn and feel that peculiar loneliness. The sky is full of stars. Some of them are clearly inhabited by people doing interesting…

There is nothing else but fire, crawling under the episupradermacoritical layer of my skin, spreading out like a slime mould with determination, at the speed of thought, which depends on the myelin that lets, my thoughts jump from node to node, using ligaments and muscles that, though I posess them, and have lived with them all my life, I cannot remember nor understand, though the fluid of the blastocoel, that still remains as a remnant in my body, peppered with the dying remnants of apoptosing…

I've seen the picture of the iPhone Duo, still in the store, perched on a stand, its screen flickering with broken white lines. Apple has touted testing the screen hinge, opening it mechanically thousands of times. The phone survived every test it was put through. Yet here it is, on the stand, with a broken screen. Wait till the product meets its first customer. I'm sure the tests worked in theory and in the delicate hands of its engineers. But customers' hands are anything but delicate.…

I've written before about how Philbo Distribution exists as a great option for indie and small-press comic companies to get their stuff out to comic shops. To assist the companies making comics and the stores buying them, Philbo has announced a variety of new plans and initiatives. There will be flat 50% off retail pricing for stores (many distributors have order levels for discounts), no minimum order amounts, a shorter FOC (30 days instead of 60 so stores can wait a bit longer for any…

Vibe coded apps are improving the TV viewing experience by doing away with adverts, removing bloatware from the device, and blocking tracking apps, enhancing viewer privacy in the process, says John Higgins, writing for The Verge. Maybe now we can settle into an evening of watching some TV, without being watched by the TV.

Webmentions came up in a recent conversation at the KrautPress Website Club, and Manuel just wrote about them, so I thought I might write down what webmentions are and how they’re supposed to work. “Supposed to” is the kicker here, because implementations vary considerably from system to system. The basic idea: when you link to a post, your site notifies that post via a webmention. That’s it! Webmention is a W3C Recommendation from 2017 that describes a simple protocol for notifying a URL when…

Today I'm checking out a newer take on an old classic: Snake Eyes, AKA Dawn Moreno. OK, so yes, this is definitely not the Snake Eyes who you probably remember most fondly. Instead, this is Dawn Moreno, a former student at Springfield High School (the town founded by Cobra) who caught the attention of Cobra Commander and the Baroness because of her athleticism. The brainwave scanner was used on her and Moreno was accidently implanted with the stored memories of the deceased Snake Eyes (he was…

location: Level 19, Rydges Melbourne

Programmers spend a lot of time fighting against duplication. Duplicated code is bad, other things equal, because it is inefficient, harder to maintain, harder to improve, much buggier, and much more confusing. Duplicated data is bad, other things equal, for many of the same reasons, but it's arguably even more confusing, because in practice it often takes the form of, e.g., a "master database table" with three different SKU columns that encode subtly different information. Not all duplication…

It seems strange that barely three weeks after my visit to Faversham, that leading Kent brewer, Shepherd Neame would unveil ambitious plans to secure the future of brewing in the town. The announcement was accompanied, by news of a £15 million investment in a new, modern brewery that will reshape the company’s historic operations while retaining brewing at the heart of the town. The proposal represents one of the most significant changes in Shepherd Neame’s recent history and reflects how…

[They’re not for eating.] A.I. food art has rapidly become an extreme red flag for me. If a restaurant uses it on their signage, I’m likely to steer clear of them entirely. Just take a photo of the thing you make!1 My pal Andy Ihnatko sagely noted Anthony Bourdain’s rule against eating at a restaurant with a filthy bathroom, and proposed the presence of A.I. food art as a similarly useful filter. I agree. Whatever the reality may be, the use of A.I. generated food imagery smacks of a lack of…

Lately, I've been trying to learn more about AI, particularly large language models (LLMs). My usual approach to learning a new subject is to read the classic books on the topic. However, since this version of generative and agentic AI is so new and evolving so rapidly, it's been difficult to find good, established books that covers it and explains it so a web developer like me could understand it.So I decided to try something different by learning AI with AI. That is, I asked Claude to explain…

About what I've learned, my experience over ten years of visits to BHS at Valley Health in Winchester, Virginia, and my notes on the subject. I've spent about ten years cycling through Behavioral Health Services at Valley Health in Winchester. They've got a new mental health pavilion opening, so some of this may already be history. Empath is just a unit — an intake facility. You don't have to go through the ER. That matters more than the marketing. (Empath here means behavioral-health intake,…

Back to fun posts!! Quick summary of what I mean when I mention OCs (original characters): we (my friends and I) kind of treat them as barbies/dolls where we play pretend and have our OCs interact. This is for fun and as a treat! I have actually made zines of them but don’t really plan to do any big comic project with them at this time (at least, not for the OCs I am about to talk about). I mention this because I think sometimes people don't understand why you would make OCs if there isn't a…

KEEPER LINK I wanted to share a tool with the blogging community that I made for my various long-form campaigns. I tend to keep fairly detailed session notes, so I wanted a keeper that could help me to manage specific notes about specific non-player characters. Over the course of a few years I built up a database of over 2,000 names and surnames and made a spreadsheet that could spit out random permutations of those names if I needed to make an NPC on the fly. I then also track where the…

Many people go to the pub for the beer. Others, the food. Some for the peace, the escape. There are those who go for the architecture. A few just like a good example of banquette seating to rest their weary legs. All of the above, in turn, gets its degree of scrutiny. Which pubs take care of their beer? Or have a decent menu? Or just look great? But one area that often gets overlooked is what are the best pubs for a chat. If you spend any time in pubs you’ll soon work that out. Some pubs are…

In June in Toronto, I was thrilled to see an old warhorse F59 commuter engine continuing to pull GO Train consists in and out of Union Station. These old engines, which were built for GO Transit at the old GM Diesel plant in London, Ont. from 1990 to 1994, had been disappearing from the GO Transit roster for years, replaced by newer, sleeker MP40s and MP54s. This shot below was taken behind the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I mentioned in a post last summer that I would miss the F59s, which…

John Lewis have released their ad, Tesco is full of chocolate advent calendars, and Russell Brand is off to jail. It must be Christmas! Time to show you all the gorgeous – and subtly smutty – card that Stuart has drawn this year, and explain how you can get one. As regular readers will know, […]

Today is November 5th, so tonight is Guy Fawkes’ Night (or Bonfire Night). This is not celebrated in the Republic of Ireland, not least because of its anti-Catholic origins, but is a big thing in the United Kingdom. In Ireland the bonfires and fireworks happen on Halloween. Bonfire Night commemorates the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which was intended to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was supposed to light the blue touchpaper on that occasion and it has been a tradition to burn his…

Still reveling in the wave.