Hello, hello. Today wasn’t so much of a no spend day. Went out to get tacos with my siblings and it was super good! I don’t regret going with them since we rarely get to go out together. It got me inspired to look up recipes on how to make different taco fillings so I don’t have to depend on going to shops to have them. They look pretty easy, I’m gonna have to try them sometime. On the entertainment front though, I just found a new hobby! Print and play card/board games. I have pretty much all…
As an engineer, you need taste. You need to be able to figure out what makes what you build provide a beautiful UX. LLMs today can do a lot for you – code, organize, laundry etc. During times like these, you need to have taste. Taste, to direct the LLM to build something that has a great UX and DX. By default, an LLM can do many things right and yet get to a point where the user wouldn’t like the feel of it. An LLM is only as good as the person instructing it. That doesn’t mean that you are as…
Mercy is the hardest magic for a witch to learn.Any witch can curse. Any witch can hex. Any witch can call down fire, rot, silence, madness, or whatever else the old books and older powers are willing to teach her.Mercy is different.Larina is powerful, loyal, brilliant, and brave. But she is not famous for her impulse control or her anger control. Sometimes she sees the cruelty, the monster, the threat to someone she loves, and her first instinct is simple enough.Burn it all down. Burn fucking…
A year and a half out from Failbetter my body is finally unlearning the schedule. I spent a long time kind of doing a poor impression of a morning person because of the time differential between here and London; now I'm finding myself being up at 1-2AM writing, and honestly it's a joy I completely forgot about. I missed the dark, which given what my previous job was, is kind of ironic.
When your working life gets interrupted, everyone asks the same question. So, what are you looking for?It's a kind question. It's also premature. Before you can answer what you're looking for, you need to know what you're choosing between, and almost nobody has that list.I didn't. So before I started looking for anything, I went and built it.The default is invisible until it breaksA career runs on autopilot for years at a time. You don't choose it every morning. You inherit it, then you…
Back in the mid-90s in Austin, there was less than nothing to do. So we’d all go to school or work and then come home, watch The Simpsons, and then play guitars and talk about guitars. Mexican Fenders were a new thing. And the Japanese Fenders were coming back into the market too. And I remember actively making fun of a guy for having a Japanese Stratocaster. It seems ridiculous now, but this is just kind of how things were. And the Mexican instruments were not there yet, but you could get one…
A presentation by the Bavarian Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Transport (StMB) about expansion plans for the Nuremberg S-Bahn includes several branches to be electrified. Naturally, the presentation includes costs and distances. However, dividing the cost by the distance has little hope of giving us the normal electrification costs in Germany, because all of these projects include other things as well. This is typical of line-by-line electrification: it comes as part of a modernization…
On the Blaugust Discord, UltrViolet suggested that bloggers link their post titles to the permalinks so that it’s easy to just right-click, “Copy Link as Markdown,” and get a formatted link with the correct title. (I’ve noticed Orion includes this in its context menu, and there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that add it.) I’ve been using the publication date in the post footer as the permalink on all the 11ty-generated parts of my site since I first converted the Les Mis blog back in…
While looking for linking conventions regarding permalink locations, I found a reference on Wikipedia to <a rel="bookmark" href="..."> being used for permalinks. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed or used that. I didn’t find any mentions of people actually using it that way. Mostly I found secondhand references to other references to the HTML spec (yes, it’s official!), which has this clear as mud description: The bookmark keyword may be used with a and area elements. This keyword creates a…
I've spent today reading through a blaugust 2026 RSS feed that I imported courtesy of 82MHz. Thank you! It's been really nice to have all the blogs in one place in my RSS reader and has pushed me to make a point of reading even more of folk's blog posts. Very fun. I'm also trying to make a point to email people more this month. It makes my day when someone emails me about my blog posts (you mean people read these?) so I hope to make someone else's day in the same way. I've spent the rest of the…
Old Scottish joke:An old man at a bar is complaining. “You see that bridge there? I built it with my own hands! But do they call me ‘MacGregor The Bridge-Builder’? No! And I raised five beautiful children! But do they call me ‘MacGregor The Child-Raiser’? No! But, you fuck one sheep . . .”Has MacGregor been treated unfairly?This was my complaint in The Beauty Of Settled Science. Psychology laid bare the secrets of the brain - it performs computations through a neural network communicating via…
As the title says. A set of three railroad tracks cutting through a forested area.
It's about Groudle, so therefore, brilliant. What more is there to say? OK, there is a bit more. This latest version of the guide, at 70 pages, is far more than a simple stock list. The text takes the reader from the earliest days of the Glen, and then the railway at the end of it. It introduces the steam locos, then their electric replacements, and exactly how badly those worked out. We go through dereliction, and gradual restoration before coming up to the present day. Only after this, do we…
Exciting news, readers! My copies of THE SHRINKER are on their way and should arrive tomorrow. I'll put the book up on my Ebay shop as soon as I can. It does mean the early bird discount will be coming to an end, so if you want to benefit from a bit of money off, order your copy now. You have until the weekend.I'm keeping busy with the next couple of books, the first of which will
I had no idea that this existed until recently. Back in 2024, Kate Bush released a short animated music video called Little Shrew (Snowflake) – the word in brackets being the name of the track from her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow that is used as the soundtrack for this startling and poignant anti-war story. Apparently, the image of the destroyed block of flats that you see in the video is based on a real photograph that Bush saw – an image of the war in Ukraine. Yet the video doesn’t focus on…
Stamped hands and plastic wristbands cover the sweaty crowd as lights flick on at the end of the show. Crowds bump and grind to the bathrooms as eyes adjust and ears pop. Minutes later you pile into the car with your friends and buckle up for a slow, traffic-jammy trip out of the lot, down the highway, and home to bed. Killing an hour on your way home from a concert is a piece of cake, though. Just roll down those windows, pump those fists, honk that horn, and get ready to scrape that scratchy…
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, August 10 through Sunday, August 16! This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes: When the event will take place What the event is Where the event will take place Who is holding the event This week’s events Monday, August 10 Tuesday, August 11 Wednesday, August 12 Thursday, August 13 Friday, August 14 Saturday, August 15 Sunday, August…
Gambler x Gamble!! (two exclamation marks) is a game from Japan released in 2024. It is a reimplementation of a 2016 game called Gambler x Gamble! (one exclamation mark), which won the Group SNE Contest in 2015. We all know what it will be named when it gets a third edition, don't we? When I read the rules, the first thing that comes to mind is this is Machi
This is David, your freshly recharged human web crawler, back from a holiday in the Swiss Alps. You are reading issue 580 of the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I'm here to help you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. It's great to have you.Before I forget: I found some spare time to give collections a bit of a glow-up, making it more fun to explore the rich…
I spent a lot of today thinking the decline in how people treat each other. Eventually I landed on a hazy kind of point about how a way that people are dumb, rude, mean, and inconsiderate offline is clearly influenced by the way people speak to and about each other online. I spent a lot of today thinking about that because Sydney Towle, a social media influencer who documented her three-year battle with cancer on Tiktok, died yesterday at the age of 26. In her New York Times obit, Katherine…
New York NYThis is a Kyoto based chain, apparently. This one is just outside the iconic Tonight Show marquee at Rockefeller Center. It’s a pretty trendy looking place and was quite busy.I ordered an iced Kyoto Latte with oat milk. It was pretty good and refreshing in the ridiculous heat.
Hosting some friends and showing off our backyard last month. Read More ... Continue reading Showing Off Our Backyard at PMags.com.
I wanted to keep my code in multiple remotes. github since it is still where everyone reaches to see what I'm doing. codeberg since it is my preferred forge. Apparently git supported multiple remotes for fetch and push, so this is how i configured my repo. After initializing git and making some commits, I first added the two remotes: github and codeberg respectively. git remote add codeberg ssh://git@codeberg.org/user/project.git git remote add github git@github.com:user/project.git Then, I set…
I’ve added the possibility of generating Asciidoctor-style admonitions to this website, not only in the final HTML generated for this website, but also in the PDF and EPUB outputs, and you might have seen them in action in previous posts. In Asciidoctor and Antora I liked to use such highlighted blocks, to showcase some particular information, so I wanted to have them on this website too. Although, as you might imagine, Markdown does not provide this capability per se. The Markdown code I use…
This is now, it appears to transpire, a blog about karate. I’VE BEEN TRYING A LOT OF NEW HOBBIES AND SIMILAR LATELY. As a 37-year-old white American male (even one who exercises regularly and has largely given up red meat), statistically speaking I’m damned close to my actual life median if not past it already1, and I’m attempting to handle it with with the intentionality that I try to bring to all things I do in life2. I think that most typical mid-life crises as depicted in U.S. culture are…
A look at my collection of black and white publicity photos from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me continues with an image of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and James Hurley (James Marshall) at the light at Sparkwood & 21. This print comes from a collection of prints from Spelling Films International that I won at auction.... The post Twin Peaks Publicity – Spelling Films International – Laura Palmer and James Hurley at Sparkwood & “21” – 151-22 appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.
Homescreen on Android. Moved eSIM from iPhone to Razr today.
Today, I was feeling so good, not only did we do the Costco shop, but I was able to get the garlic strung up, and kept going until it was getting too dark to see. Which means I will be doing the stock up shop and update posts tomorrow. I’ll be heading out again tomorrow, … Continue reading What a difference a day makes!
Typesetting tables in latex is annoying. In practice, I usually have the tabular data in some programming-friendly format and need to put it in latex. I forget how to do this nicely, but it's extremely simple using the tabulate package in python. import tabulate from itertools import batched # Data A = [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 26, 31, 34, 35, 39, 41, 47, 51, 55, 59, 71, 79, 87, 95, 111, 119, 131, 143, 159, 167, 191, 215, 231, 239, 287, 311, 359, 479, 551, 671, 719…
Welcome to Container Escapes 101 at the AppSec Village at DEF CON 34!! 🎯 Goal: to have a working knowledge of container escapes and how each security measure or risk maps to potential for exploitation. With actual exploits … mostly of misconfigurations or the “rough edges” of containers. Where we’re going There’s a lot of hard-earned lessons at the weird intersection of how a no-longer-...
