I really wanted to make friends with this board. It has a lot of neat features. But a lousy configuration program has doomed it to the give-away pile. Features: Hall effect, with 3.5mm travel North-facing LEDs Comes with back-illuminated shine-through keycaps, which are OK as far as plastic caps go, but have not much in the way of feel Clicky, not thocky. Crisp bottom out. ASUS Gear Link is the web configurator. Comes in fancy padded case. 75% Only 12 3/8 inches wide Issues: Individual key…

By Stephen Greenblatt. This is a historical, occasionally speculative biography of Shakespeare, with particular attention to how overlooked features of Elizabethan England can help us understand Shakespeare's work. It's excellent. Other reviews (e.g., this and this) overstate just how speculative it is. Just about anyone who reads this book ought to become a better reader of Shakespeare. This reminds me of Abe, David S. Reynolds' biography of Abraham Lincoln centered on American culture of the…

Many of you have been writing in to ask if Roterfaden still makes the Taschenbegleiter in the smaller A6 size, and it turns out they do. While they no longer make this size available in every color and finish, I managed to secure a batch of the Taschenbegleiter BS_20 covers in this gorgeous dark brown/cognac leather, in both A4 and A6 sizes. We also have stock of the Taschenbegleiter LTD 038 in A4, which appears similar but features a beige elastic and sand felt interior as opposed to the…

One of the earliest programmes I featured on Curious British Telly was Mop and Smiff, a BBC preschooler's show from the mid-1980s. The reason it featured so early on was because, back when I was first starting to watch television, I was a huge fan.I also managed to get in touch with Mike Amatt, one of the show's stars. This allowed me to find out more about the series was produced, and Mike had plenty of memories to share. Accordingly, this is why I've chosen to feature Mop and Smiff in my…

One of the retrospective embarrassments I have with Rip It Up and Start Again is the non-appearance of "Sex Drive" by The Embarrassment.But then I had never heard it when doing the book. Indeed had barely heard of The Embarrassment, nor been given any reason to think the Kansas (post?)punkers were worth chasing down.Not sure how they actually swam into my ken but eventually they did a few years ago. I became quite addicted to "Sex Drive", their debut single, in particular. Particularly love the…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is a fall freebie, and it’s been a while since I looked at book covers… so I’m going to dig out some fall-themed covers to enjoy! Some of these are set in fall or around Halloween, or have creepy Halloween-y vibes; some are just orange/red colours. Bit of a random mix, and not all books I’ve necessarily loved, but I enjoy the colours and had fun getting a chance to really look at and think about book covers again — it’s been a while! I know there’s another…

The local HVAC company we use puts out a newsletter with company news (like employee of the month) and a community calendar. It’s hokey and awesome. And, of course, the September issue has a persimmon pudding recipe.

Cloak and Dagger is supposedly a kids movie — kind of a crossover into fantasy.Henry Thomas (yes, the kid from E.T.) plays Davey, a kid who loves role-playing games, especially those starring his hero, Jack Flack. He also has a vidid fantasy life, imagining Jack in real-life. Jack is played by Dabney Coleman, who also plays Davey’s widower Dad.Davey accidentally witnesses a real-life murder, the victim of which hands him a video game cartridge and a mysterious number. Now Davey is running from…

Sébastien Doubinsky Under Review:Ink Honey Blossom. Liza Losada. Sibylline Press, September 2026. Liza Losada’s Ink Honey Blossom is a fantasy novel set in a futuristic world where the male population is the victim of a lethal disease called the Blight. Only specially trained women can cure them, using a telepathic drug called “Sona”, which enables them to share their male clients’ dreamscape (called their “SonaScape”) and grant them some of their life force. This has become a monetized ritual,…

Without an announcement or a decision, really, I used the sale of my home and the flurry of events that followed as an excuse to walk away from just about everything. Not permanently, mind you, and it turned out to be a much-needed break that I didn't realize I'd been putting off for far too long. My own unintended version of On the Road without all the typing.In the last two months or so we have lived in four different homes in three different states and locked into a contract on our next…

Small pleasures: A new season of Slow Horses is here.

This meme seems like such a mild, reasonable request. And yet, few humans until a couple decades ago would have imagined any entitlement to mercy when showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. We easily recognized that even if you're there by invitation, with a mission of helping, even that wouldn't earn you a guaranteed pass ("No good deed goes unpunished!"). The notion of deserving grace is quite new, but it's so thoroughly baked-in that I seem like quite a jerk, objecting to a nice…

We once again got a new set of warnings yesterday, and new movement towards living in a sane world. On the heels of its pause in inference and training due to its latest sandbox escape, OpenAI has cancelled the planned release of their next frontier model, which would have become Astra 6.1. The candidate for Astra 6.1 was found to be too misaligned, including deception and exceeding scope. This leaves Anthropic in a strong position with Opus 5.5, which means they can afford to reciprocate by…

Fancy an animated musical, but don’t have the time to fit one in to your busy schedule? The try Butter Boy, the new project from Amelia Kim. The story is simple – and so I will keep this quicj to allow you to enjoy the video. There’s a boy made of butter, whose life is less than perfect because basically he is unhygienic and sticky. In the great tradition of young heroes of animated musicals, he bursts into song to wonder what his life would be like if he wasn’t… made of butter. That’s it –…

Today we learned more about plumbing — specifically the pipes that move things out from the house. And somewhat like a colonoscopy, it’s stressful, fascinating, and sometimes important. We now have a better understanding of approaches to fortify the abode, just in case the next “1,000 year rain” comes sooner than predicted. Currently Listening: Gliiico “Secret Water”Reply via email

I've written a lot about the economics of inference - especially with the advent of "good enough" open weights models. We're starting to see real price competition from all the frontier labs, even Anthropic who have been reticent to reduce prices. Let's dive into the market dynamics. OpenAI fired the starting pistol The original 80% price cut at the very end of July on GPT-5.6 Luna certainly shook the market up, and indeed for the first time in recent memory ended up with a non open weights…

Because I often wonder this, and because fish makes it easy, and because writing it down here might help you and will definitely help me remember it! Assumed audience: Other software developers who use fish shell. Last night, I was trying to figure out where a particular environment variable had come from, and went searching1 for a way to figure that out. I was delighted, as I often am, to find that fish makes it incredibly easy. If you want to know where and how SOME_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE was…

I am now in Minneapolis!! I am going to eat a lot of good food and enjoy myself!! I have family in the area and am hanging out with them. We're also visiting various museums and theaters and hanging around the parks and bike paths. I would like to get an unreasonably large number of dumb local iNat identifications. They do not even have to be fancy to make me happy!! Weeds are different everywhere!! So far we have hit up the Skyways and the Mall of America. They were both definitely More than I…

My real-world job is as an English lecturer and every time I use even a little AI to enhance a resource (it avoids copyright and it’s, well, free), I am met by waves (occasionally the odd tsunami) of approbation by my students that I am single-handedly killing the planet. I would wearily point out the hypocrisy of their statements – so many of the digital devices that they cover end up in landfill because they are hard to recycle – and that’s just a starter), but I refrain. However, the…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Image by Tumisufrom PixabayEveryone knows that this is the site that likes to give you more!And, as luck - and timing - would have it, that's what we're all going to get, as this month sees us experiencing its third edition of the feature that readers can't get enough of.And that's the one in which you and you alone get to decide just what we'll be talking about.Remember, no government,…

Detail of an abandoned warehouse in Downtown Tyler, Texas. The post Closed for Business appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Grabe time flies haha I missed around 30 weeks!! Time to get back into this and just share random updates in one post. Some thoughts on kendo, and upcoming trips, pati reflections in life lol

The Android phone application Google Maps should have been a blockbuster winner for Google, but it’s always been deeply flawed.

By K.E. Roberts / September 29, 2026 From the cover of Dianetics, 2007 edition Anyone who was watching TV in the late 1980s remembers the commercial: probing personal questions appear in white text on a black screen as a Tangerine Dream-esque synth riff pulsates in the background. ”How can you increase your mind’s potential?”; “Why is it so hard to just ‘be yourself’”; “Do you have to live with pain?” With each question, a page number appears in red on the bottom right. Then, the music climaxes…

Called out and went to the urgent care. They were actually quite nice, which was a relief. Wasn't the most expensive thing in the world either thankfully. Got my medicine from the pharmacy, and I'm making the poor financial decision of stopping at my favorite sandwich place, because I deserve some comfort food. Fuck all this bad luck you can't stop me

I'm bummed to be missing @omfest.co. I bought a ticket but it snuck up on me and I couldn't get down to SF in time.

Folks that don’t use Microsoft Windows (which is a wise choice) like to point out there’s plenty of under the hood and obscure elements in the latest version of Windows 11 that are legacy code bits from the days of Windows 95 and Windows 2000. They would not be wrong. Apple users in particular like to talk about how macOS doesn’t share these struggles, as quality control is much better with Apple products. That’s why we pay a premium price for the Apple experience. It’s the blend of hardware…

In his Scholarly Kitchen article Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Multilingual researchers’ use of AI in academic writing, Avi Staiman argues that “’Did you use AI?’ is a nearly useless question.” Magically AI offered a solution to the problem — described recently in a comment by rrherch as “The language of science is broken English” — of non-English-speaking researchers writing their academic papers for publication in English language journals, only for the world of publishing to snatch…

Laptop chips have gotten very powerful in recent years, with increasing CPU core counts, more powerful iGPUs, and higher DRAM bandwidth to feed that compute. All of that creates pressure on the chip’s system level architecture, which must deliver high bandwidth, service an increasing number of blocks, and keep latency under control. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is a good example of how powerful recent laptop chips have become, with 18 CPU cores and an iGPU packing nearly as much…