I said a lot about Data East Pinball in the last episode, and soon there won't be anything else to say about Data East Pinball, because this episode contains Maverick, their final game before they're bought by Sega. Except: maybe their final game is Tattoo Assassins. Which is not a pinball game. It's a rushed, low-budget imitation of Mortal Kombat, because this was a world where Mortal Kombat was suddenly everywhere, and Data East leadership decided it was important to develop a competitor. So…

I'LL BE YOURS (1947), starring the great Deanna Durbin, is now available on Blu-ray from Universal.Durbin is one of a couple people at the very top of my list of favorite actresses, and I'LL BE YOURS was one of only three of her films I'd not yet seen. The remaining titles for me to see for the first time are CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944) and UP IN CENTRAL PARK (1948).I actually own all three movies in various formats, including VHS tapes, DVDs, and in the case of CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY, a Region 2 DVD.…

This short story collection is divided into 5 sections. First is the story "The Tiger in the Grass," which I enjoyed very much. The starting point was that the protagonist's son was dying and he had requested that she write a short account of her long life. I could not tell if it was autobiographical or not. I suspect it was a mix. Either way, I enjoyed it. It was a poignant story, but not too sad.The next section was titled "First Work." The stories were shorter, and beautifully written, but…

[1979]Speaking of strange electronic novelty pop. What about this futuristic slice of disco pop made by Avant guard composer Basil Kirchin. A somewhat positive ode to the silicon chip, I think... maybe. I guess old Basil wasn't to know the silicon chip would be instrumental in psy-ops, mind control and ultimately community division. Progress...*This wasn't released in 1979. It languished in some vault for over 35 years until Jonny Trunk got his oven mits on it and issued it on seven inch in…

Someone who only uses an iPhone as a phone is going to have a very different daily battery-life experience than someone who listen to podcasts all day, or someone who doomscroll all day. So when Apple tells you about long the battery will last streaming a video, how does that translate to what you are going to experience? As Adam Engst of TidBITS wrote, Apple has started using a new measurement this year that may be useful for how we use phones in 2026: Finally, a sensible spec! Introduced this…

On the way to a photo shoot, I found myself running early, so I stopped off in the Nottingham district of Sherwood. The forest is close by, in case you wondered. It's an interesting place. More charity shops than you can shake a stick at, but also a local baker and lots of visible signs of community action to brighten the place up. I popped some of them in this Instagram post. Halfway along the street is Sherwood bus depot. According to this document (PDF), it was built in 1901, originally as a…

Apple, together with American Academy of Pediatrics, has published Building Healthy Digital Habits: A Guide for Families. Step one is to plan with your children. ~ Link: Building Healthy Digital Habits: A Guide for Families, by Apple

short version: The AI jobs debate argues about 2030, but the destination is the least useful part of it. Anthropic's harshest modelled scenario puts the US economy 32.4% larger than the no-AI path by 2030, with knowledge-worker unemployment at 17.9% — and, strikingly, average wages rising about 9.9% while knowledge-worker wages fall more than 10%. The economy gets richer as the people who built it get poorer. What almost nobody models is the path between here and there, and the evidence on that…

In my previous post about my terminal-native setup for coding agents, I described using Heeler to connect from my iPhone to Herdr running on my Mac. Heeler connects over SSH through Tailscale, but that setup left me with one small annoyance: the hostname depended on where I was. At home, with Tailscale disabled, Bonjour made the Mac available as: cookiebook.local Away from home, with Tailscale enabled, I used its Tailscale hostname instead.

May I propose “BSI”, for Bullshit Intelligence?

Dip is free, runs in your browser, and needs no account: dip.kestrelsnest.social. Play it with friends, or against house players who negotiate, remember your promises, and sometimes break them. Here’s why I made it. The final board of my last game. Red is me: Austria, 19 centers, from Norway to Smyrna. My history with Diplomacy High school. Ryan, one of my closest friends, made contact with a similar friend group two towns over who played this game called Diplomacy. No dice, no luck, just seven…

Don’t miss the amazing creator signings for The Day of Dredd, the international celebration of the ultimate lawman of the future, Judge Dredd, on 3 October 2026. A titanic celebration of one of the most famous characters in comics history that will give fans the chance to share in their love of Judge Dredd, The Day of Dredd will be marked by creator signings at locations across the UK –

Walk into a grocery store and you’re surrounded by freshly misted lettuce, bubbling lobster tanks, and hot croissants rolling out of the oven. With your pupils dilated and mouth watering, there’s nothing finer than rolling your crookedy-wheel cart by the deli counter and making some subtle eye contact with the deli man. Yeah, you know it and they know it: when you’re surrounded by fresh food in all directions you suddenly start jonesing for a fix. So you press your hands on the curved glass and…

Summer fishing. Another hot, rainless start to the season limiting the river fishing, instead I concentrated on some local ponds, targeting the carp & perch. Over the summer I landed 233 carp (including 27 doubles), 38 perch (to 3lb 2oz), 49 barbel, plus a few surprises. So here's a quick recap of the summer - written monthly as I went along... April: Cracking straight on this year - a few trips to the Farm Pond during the river closed season. Frosty mornings and warm afternoons weren't idea…

As I mentioned yesterday, a friend and I started a little Substack publication called The Rocker Step. It occurred to me shortly after posting about it that some folks might not know what a rocker step is. The TL;DR is that it's an athletic move that is frequently used in sports including basketball and (American) football. From the Cambridge Dictionary entry: In sports such as basketball and American football, a step taken by putting one foot in front of the other, putting weight on the back…

Over the last three decades, Japan has massively come round to fragrance and perfume. I say that with a caveat: trains and buses are not generally filled with the noxious tropes of the western scent model – when you do smell those clobberheads and turn around it will inevitably be a gaijin giving off that particular aroma and they have never been nor will ever be internalized here as the standard scent model, they are just too……….brutal; vulgar; as subtle as anvils. Having said that, I was…

A Scene from Mott Street – New York, New York We are back to black-and-white for the last picture from Chinatown. I’m moving beyond the architecture, capturing more of the street scene in a very busy part of town. While I tried to reduce the clutter in the first two pictures, I embraced it here. I’m using a 50mm on my Leica Monochrom, which is usually not wide enough for architecture, but somehow I managed to include a lot of it here in a structured way that pleases me. Notice the foreground…

Thinking About Myself; Yourself A 2007 anime called Myself; Yourself came up in one of my recent email exchanges. The anime was an adaptation of, or companion to, a PlayStation 2 visual novel of the same name, which was released exclusively in Japan in 2007. The anime, which was produced by studio Doga Kobo, made it stateside and aired for 13 episodes in the fall 2007 season. I had been aware of the anime since 2008-09 or so, and not for a good reason. I had noticed that it received negative…

Math was here. Sketched on the back of a greeting card. Now it’s down to patience and a breath-steadied hand revealing a window’s design, one extracted card rectangle at a time. Pulled from a love letter. Freehanded as times like... Read More ›

I recently warned you to back away from the pumpkin spice because it was still summer. It isn't anymore. Fall officially arrived, which means I'm now willing to acknowledge it. I'm not ready to fill a wagon with scarecrows but I can manage a small amount of fall. It's not that I don't like the...Read More

This may perhaps be one of the most challenging writing projects I've ever completed, despite its slender little 40-ish minute run time (mostly due to concurrent events in various hotel rooms Since May, I've had to keep straight and a non-linear narrative that I even managed to confuse myself at points and had to iron out. Still, it's finally finished, lots of fun, and a great way to kick-off spooky season...If you are a New Play Exchange member, you can read it…

Sol LeWitt, From the Upper Left and Right Corners Toward the Center of the Page. R 324, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via Native Sol LeWitt, From the Midpoint of the Left and a Point Halfway Between the Mid Point of the Left Side and Upper Left Corner Towards the Center of the Page. R327, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via Native Sol LeWitt, From the Midpoint of the Left and Right Sides Toward the Center of the Page. R329, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via…

The following is something I wrote about 4 years ago and shared on my Instagram story to my followers, most of whom are people I know in real life. I believe I wrote this after finishing Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls and reading some of Hadewijch: The Complete Works, hence my inclusion of Hadewijch's Poems in Stanza 38.I found myself thinking back on this today after a conversation with a coworker about working in academia as a non-academic. Every day, I feel as though I become…

In my Mothership open table, a character named Manny Vasquez recently died. One of the other PCs, Dürmig Ableton, decided to use one of his downtime actions to arrange a memorial service for Manny — a chance for everyone who had worked with him to share their memories and commend him to the wisdom of the stars. I loved this idea, but it was also problematic. Sure, we could play through the memorial service with the four players who were currently at the table, but what about the other twenty…

Dear podcasts and apps, Stop telling me your subscription only cost one cup of coffee per month. Because my daily cup of coffee cost me about SGD 0.25 (about USD 0.20) per cup. And your subscription is much more expensive than that. Thank you. Sincerely, Not a picky coffee drinker.

I was working on one of my “back of the envelope” diagrams for a post on microsegmentation and decided to draw the one pictured above as a warm-up exercise. It turned out well enough that I thought it was worth posting on its own. You might find it useful with clients when they look at you with puzzlement when you talk about “north-south” versus “east-west” in network security. You can also use the text below when explaining the concepts; feel free to “copy, paste, and adjust to taste”:…

Silver Porsche gets a champagne gradient from the setting sun, in this shot from last week. エレクトリック 先週撮影。夕日を受けて、シルバーのポルシェがシャンパンゴールドのグラデーションに染まる。

Currently, I am recording computer screens on Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS almost daily while testing web applications, creating demo videos for assistive technology settings, and creating screen recordings for teaching or class presentations. Instead of using paid or free screen recording apps that require internet access or additional downloads, I mostly use the built-in free screen recorder options on each device record part or all of the screen, as well as record system audio and/or…

Let’s take another break from those endless TIFF reviews, with Cláudio Alves and Eurocheese appointing themselves juries to choose the best of the fest, beyond Best Actress chatter. I AM ROCKY was the People’s Choice Award runner-up at TIFF, just behind LA BOLA NEGRA. Will its popularity be reflected in Cláudio and Eurocheese’s picks? EUROCHEESE: Having covered our favorite leading ladies at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, Cláudio and I will be naming our favorites in a…