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.

Happy slightly belated Halloween! Hope everyone had some spooky fun! I was home that day, so I decided last minute I should dress up as I hand out candy. I quickly threw together my Super Mario costume from last year and sat outside for a couple hours, reading and handy out candy to trick-or-treaters. My room was messy so I hastily blurred the background, sorry! I have to take down the giant skeleton from my yard this weekend, and hopefully I’ll remember that that’s a good day to change out the…

I’ve continued to work on t100.husk.org, my site that takes US flight data and recombines it in ways that are (hopefully) able to give insights into the patterns of general aviation over the last thirty plus years.The top level navigation reflects three different aggregations of the source data. There are counts over time for airports, like San Francisco; aircraft, like the Boeing 737; and airlines, like United. Each of those can be viewed over time, compared to their siblings, and for airports…

I was told recently this is a really popular one for Ramen Bae as of late – and I expect it’s due to all the beef. I had one they made with beef recently and it was quite nice. I’ll pair this with their dry noodle and we will see how it goes. Ramen Bae Dried Ramen Toppings Fried Shallot Beef Mix – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Contains beef. To prepare, when you boil your noodles, add as much or as little as you want. Finally, stir and enjoy! As you can see, there’s…

Being the middle child isn’t easy, but the bonds you form with your siblings can be some of the closest and most impactful relationships in your life. Author Daryl Gregory shares memories of his sisters from his childhood, and talks about how their bond played a roll in creating his newest novel, The Porcelain Sisters. DARYL GREGORY: Is there something wrong with me that I find two sisters fighting with each other to be hugely entertaining? I was the middle child, the boy sandwiched between two…

A few black and white photos from a snowy 2024. Thankfully it’s not this snowy these days.

For decades I felt that part of my job for my employer was to answer the question: “If X, then Y?” There are countless examples from my career that I could provide, but here are a few that should ring a bell for anyone over cough 30 cough. If broadband internet becomes ubiquitous, more commerce will move online. If bandwidth costs go to near zero, much of the traffic will be video. If everyone owns a mobile phone, their first experience with a website will be mobile. If browsers become capable…

So I guess I'll be selling iced coffee to my neighbors while I look for my next job. Or making it (my next job)Not only that, I'd be applying everything I've learnt in outreach and marketing for this "role." I'll even build the apps and tools that I think would add an extra layer of 🧑‍🍳 oui oui service. I'm strangely excited for this. The goal is to first test the market next week. I'll need to build a booking system where my neighbors can "book" their coffee and then I deliver it. I might even…

There were a number of extraordinary historical firsts in Tuesday's midterm elections — among them Keisha Lance Bottoms of Georgia (the first Black woman to be elected governor of a U.S. state), and Gina Hinojosa of Texas (the first Hispanic governor of that state) — but the one that affected me most, and I'm not really sure why, was the election of Deb Haaland as New Mexico's governor, making her the first Native American female governor in U.S. history. [ Photograph by The Tyler Twins for The…

I’m probably not going to turn this essay into a video and maybe not even a podcast. Not because of the theme or any of the concerns raised, but simply because I don’t know if I’ll have the time to do so this week. A couple of my videos on YouTube got picked up by their recommendation algorithm. Even by the most conservative “percentage of the audience who watched to the end” estimate, those videos had an audience that was at least one hundred times larger than my channel’s baseline. They’re…

Anthropic is warning us. Its modified S-1 now says that ‘we may imminently meet our Responsible Scaling Policy’s definition of ‘dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.’ That is a highly scary sentence to have a company put in its S-1. This could happen. For now I appreciate the relative quiet. Perhaps many were focused the election. I’m sure the quiet will not last long. We have a new biggest crypto hack, as Binance got taken for billions of dollars. The big debate of the week was…

It’s been a few years since I first released SimBuddy, my favorite tool for poking around in the Finder folders where the simulators store important things. In that time, things have changed. The Simulator is now called a Device Hub and the icons on macOS have changed significantly. This new release addresses both of those things. The first order of business was adapting to the new location where “On My iPhone” and “On My iPad” is stored in the Files app. If you do any kind of file import or…

When you tell GNU Emacs to save a file, it checks if the modification time of the file has changed since it was loaded into the editor or last saved. If so, it displays a message telling you the file has been modified and asking you to confirm that you want to overwrite the modified version with yours. This is a great idea, until you start working with files managed by Microsoft OneDrive Sync on macOS, and perhaps other sync tools and other platforms. Recently, OneDrive Sync started changing…

I started writing this on my way home after my run, but life got busy, and I never quite got around to publishing it. Today, I got to the office and saw the colleague you will read about later in this piece for the first time since the marathon. A few minutes later, I received the message in the image below, followed by an interesting conversation while we waited in the lunch queue. It made me realise that I really needed to finish this piece. So, here we go! I have just finished my 7.5 km run,…

Back in the day, when Pokémon TCG Live was announced in 2021, I was worried that the economy would make it hard to keep building decks. In the older client, PTCG Online, you could trade cards but that was removed in Live and replaced with a much anticipated crafting where you can exchange in-game currency to purchase cards you wanted. My main worry was that you could not (and still can’t) decide to dust a card, ie. turn any card you want into credits to purchase other cards. You could only get…

My latest post on Now Smell This reviews three fragrances that spin vanilla notes in more interesting directions than “marshmallow fluff” or “funfetti cake.” I love an actual dessert as much as anyone. However, I’ve wearied of the ongoing gourmand-mania that’s been dominating nouveau niche perfumery for the past year and more. So many of these fragrances are just SO sweet, and SO loud in their sweetness, that I feel olfactory fatigue even when I’m just near someone who’s wearing the latest…

I had a startle with a Great White Shark on November 3rd, 2026. We were diving at Birchy Head, down about 14m, when I noticed, in the distance (~40-foot vis and 10°C), a large shape heading fast towards me. When it was about 30-25 feet away, I realized it was a White. It had its pectoral fins down and its back arched, coming straight at me fast, about 2 feet from the bottom. While it was travelling towards me, I kept my camera out to keep something between me and it, kept eye contact and made…

After picking up a couple of issue of New Mutants on a whim a bit ago I decided that I should get the remaining issues in the story arc. Thus, Mail Call. New Mutants vol. 1 #24-25 And while I was at it, given that my comic shop doesn’t always get every variant I’m interested in, I picked this up, too. The Rocketeer: Infiltrator! #4BNathan Szerdy Variant It’s almost always the case that there will be something else arriving soon, but there really should be something that I’ve been waiting a…

A searchable library of archival films: movingimagearchive.com

Back in 2021 I promised a closer look at SHA-256 on the C64. It turns out the old program got the wrong answer for anything 32 characters or longer. Here’s the fix, and then a version that hashes in 58,514 cycles instead of 328,431.

A searchable library of archival films: www.movingimagearchive.com

erik gahner larsen on awesome lists losing their shine: the neglected ones go stale, and the rest fill up with pull requests for vibe-coded tools. I archived awesome-static-generators last month for similar reasons. new generators were turning up faster than I could review them.

Women Of Music Volume 12Sissy Spacek on cover Amanda Lynn - Singin' Jambalaya.mp3 Ann Breen - Jambalaya (On The Bayou).mp3 Carole King feat Slash - Locomotion (live).mp3 Carrie Becker Leave Me Out Of Your Plans.mp3 Cherry Blossom - Jungle Rock.mp3 Donna Loren - Shakin' All Over (live).mp3 Heidi Hall and the Chix - Black Stretch Pants.mp3 Joni Wallace - The Tennessee Rock And Roll.mp3 Joy Adams - The Snorer.mp3 Judy MCIntyre - Slyly.mp3 Lois Hinds - Loving In Vain Again.mp3 Reesa and The Rooters…

Action for Happiness do a calendar each month and this month is New Ways November. I'm always looking for new things so I'm going with the prompt 'Make a list of new things you want to try this month.' listen to a new music genre. Maybe jazz? learn to tie a proper knot (I can only tie a bow) use a new ingredient try a new recipe investigate local taxonomy (inspired by this month's blog carnival) find a new niche competition to watch but never participate in use a new tool (even just a new pen)…

As I say from time to time, every now and then I build something as a proof of concept and the result is... ok? I'm not really sure if the idea actually made sense and if the final result is usable, but the exploration was interesting enough that I think it warrants sharing with you good people. That's what today's post is. This demo all began with a simple idea - how do you handle getting RSS like content from a site that doesn't actually have an RSS feed? This typically relies on looking at…

‘If you’ve never read Orwell, you really should because he’s great.’ Monopolype Imaging (2014) It seemed like just yesterday Jeremiah Shoaf at Typewolf had drawn up his list of independent type foundries following Monotype acquiring FontShop. In fact, that was in 2014. Much has changed since then, and much else has not. Many new type foundries have come up over the last decade and plenty others have disappeared. What had not changed is Monotype’s acquisition spree. A quick recap for those who…

mieke? – “2012” Dev Lemons – “best friend” Melissa Weikart – “Contact” The post Visual Velcro 66 first appeared on Palms Out Sounds.

Are there limits to the free software movement/ideology? It appears like there are There’s a point that Pirate Praveen keeps repeating in FSCI chat group. It took me some years to understand. And there are several others who have not understood it yet. I quote: my point is, trying to project ethics beyond copyright law into software only confuses people. Ethical movements should not be centered around software, trying to change the world through software licenses is a futile excercise, it only…