Selected scenes from a walk in Malaga Lake Park. On a balmy Sunday morning, Eleanor and I took a short walk on a nature trail through Malaga Lake Park. Ellie wanted to use a real camera, and I used the opportunity to get out of the house and make some images in the woods. I enjoyed making some detailed compositions of some smaller scenes. So much so that I made a print of the image of the fallen tree trunk.

Autumn Morning flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says: Use this random word generator and write a haiku (5, 7, 5 syllables) about the first word you generate! The word I got was drift: A crisp autumn day Cluds drift across the skyline Trees dance in the breeze I took a photo through my study window, it’s at the top of this post

A simple story can have so many layers, it’s sometimes difficult to keep up. Whatever layer you get from The Boy Who Rode the Wind, this animated short by Spaghetti Tree Productions is a rewarding watch, but, if, like me, you are easily brought to tears, then have your handkerchief ready. That makes this sound like a very drab watch, but honestly, the workmanship that has gone into this is nothing short of astounding (using tools such as Higgsfield, Adobe, Suno, Claude, Davinci) and I love the…

A recent lunch with my good friend Prashanth sparked a realization about the rapidly shifting landscape of software engineering. Amidst catching up, he pointed out a looming industry paradox, as AI accelerates our coding speed, the role of Quality Assurance (QA) becomes exponentially more critical, not less. I couldn't agree more.Historically, an average developer might write 500 to 2,000 lines of production-grade code in a month. Today, with AI coding agents developer generate that same volume…

I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-) Welcome to the September edition of Interesting Links in the Data and AI World. It’s a bumper edition (aren’t they always), with lots and lots about Kafka and related technologies in particular this month. Oh, and AI. Obvs.

⏳ Did a Windows update yesterday and the only thing I’ve seen afterwards 🫤

To round off the season I took part in the Robin Hood Half Marathon, an event I enjoyed last year and one that happened to fall on my birthday this time around, so it was only fair I gave it a good crack. My family are used to me doing stupid things to celebrate my birthday, as I do not like parties, so it has become a bit of a running joke in our extended family.This year my son decided to set me a challenge by writing his time prediction in my birthday card. Below his lovely birthday wishes…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Scott Gould’s novel Beneath a Fallen Sky is a mesmerizing account of four northeast Alabamians facing predicted peril when Halley’s Comet appeared in 1910. Ethan Rutherford wrote of the…

Twelve years ago, Priyanga Burford came upon an unusual, striking story that moved her to admiration and fellowship: Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, like her half-Indian, was one of the first female agents sent from Britain into Nazi-occupied France in the darkest days of WW2. She died, heroic, finally at Dachau. There are biographie, and there has been one dramatic piece, but in research, and with this play’s writer Stephanie Street, Burford wanted to feel and understand more of “agent Madeleine”…

St. Michael at Mont St. Michell -photo by Margot Krebs Neale The end of September brings us to the feast of St. Michael and All Angels which is known as Michaelmas in England, and this first autumn term in many schools and universities is still called the Michaelmas term. The Archangel Michael is traditionally thought of as the Captain of the Heavenly Host, and, following an image from the book of Revelation, is often shown standing on a dragon, an image of Satan subdued and bound by the…

Go back five years and ask yourself what you would feel is dramatically different about how you do your work. I bet you’d not really envisage much change in the tools you use and the way of working. But then on 30 November 2022, Sam Altman posted a Tweet with the innocuous post: today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.com Suddenly the world was exposed to a magical new thing called a Large Language Model. Nobody really knew that GPT meant Generative Pre-trained…

I appear to have misplaced my mojo. I’ve not lost it completely. I mean I know roughly what it looks like, and it can’t be far cos I had it up until recently. I just can’t be bothered looking for it. I know I know, it’ll be the last place I left it. Thing is, it isn’t. I checked. I looked back a few weeks in my journal and there it is, right where I expected it to be. Except now, it isn’t. I can’t think of why it’s disappeared — I’d make a rubbish detective — and don’t think there is anything…

Ross Walking Festival 2026. Reading and snoozing. A couple of garden jobs. Autumn’s arriving. Ross Walking Festival 2026 – Walk 3 – A Waterfall, a Druid’s Well and Mysterious Stones: Harold’s Stones, Trellech Breakfast in the conservatory on Tuesday morning with Pips choosing my lap over Phil’s – a rare event. To the gym for Functional Playground then home for admin. A grey day, but clammy and humid. Admin in the afternoon, then a tactical just-after-rush-hour trip to Belmont for Lidl and…

Nobody sets out to lose their sense of wonder. We misplace it a little at a time, somewhere between the first paycheck and the hundredth status meeting. In its place we install a life of routine: predictable, controllable, and about as thrilling as a well-organized sock drawer. Then, we stand in front of that drawer and wonder why we're unhappy. The cure isn't complicated. We need some zest. We need to be shaken up, stretched, and occasionally proven wrong. Few things do that better than…

The last of the local car shows happen in September in central Indiana. The annual car show in Zionsville may be small, but it always has some good iron. I was shooting my Olympus OM-2n, with the easy breezy 40mm f/2 Zuiko Auto-S lens mounted, with Kodak T-Max 400 inside. I still had some Bellini Ecofilm left so I developed the film in it 1+1. More from this camera/film/developer combination on Monday. Get more of my photography in your inbox or reader! Click here to subscribe.

When water pools on the red dirt trails above San Carlos Falls, there are abstract images to be captured. Like this dead, stripped, floating palm frond. Source

Introduction Nearly eight years separated the releases of Valkyria Chronicles 3 and Valkyria Chronicles 4. During that time, the future of the franchise has felt uncertain at times. Valkyria Chronicles 2 had suffered from disappointing sales outside of Japan, Valkyria Chronicles 3 never received an official English localization despite many fans considering it a return to form, and Sega experimented with Valkyria Revolution, a title that ultimately distanced itself from many of the mechanics…

After work today, I decided to scribble this green guy. I feel like I'm getting better at locating facial features so the result looks ok. I started with a loose graphite sketch, then acrylic pen, some pencil, and oil pastel. I think my long gone 12 year old self would have been pretty happy with this effort. Email me about this post. Subscribe to my blog via RSS feed.

Desert Brat 2026-09-29

Power Cat 2026-09-29 I'm very disorganized

So, you’re fourteen and don’t know how to become one of the disciples of electronic music? Follow the lead of Richard James, best known as Aphex Twin, who at fourteen ripped apart that cheesy beginner’s keyboard and rewired the thing to make all sorts of utterly unnatural sounds. Next, start pressing buttons, and eleven years later you’ll be pressing buttons for a living. With the 1991 release of Analogue Bubblebath, Aphex Twin lead electronic music in a new direction. As the sunny heyday of…

Mr BW writes: It's starting to look a bit more like a 70s payphone I worked out how to divert...

Broad-winged hawks on migration (photo by Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith via Wikimedia) 29 September 2026, WINGS Veracruz: Migration is a Moving Experience: Day 1, Fly to Veracruz, tour begins at dinner. ==> I’ll be too busy to blog while I’m away and mostly off the grid, so I’ve written all 9 days in advance. Today I’m following the broad-winged hawks’ migration as I fly down the Mississippi watershed to the Texas coast and then south to Mexico. By the time I arrive at the WINGS Mexico: Veracruz…

The Last Quarter Moon is Saturday October 3. Daylight savings starts on the 4th. Saturn is at opposition, when it is biggest and brightest as seen from Earth, on the 4th. Mars forms a line with the bright stars Castor and Pollux and is close to the waning Moon on the 5th. Jupiter is low in the morning sky is close to the crescent Moon on the 6th-7th. In the evening, Venus is slowly sinking and Mercury is rising, the pair are close on the 6th-7th. The Last Quarter Moon is Saturday October 3.…

A review of Valkyria Chronicles 3

Back to the boardgame café.

The Panic of 1910-11 was a minor blip compared to many other recessions and depressions in United States history. The economic damage that year was largely confined to stock portfolios. Unemployment remained almost steady. Still, there were a lot of people out of work and, as the Panic eased in 1912, hundreds of those unemployed men descended on Cincinnati, seeking jobs and better working conditions.Because they were unemployed and traveling to look for work, they were called hobos. They called…

I wanted a cheap, low-power, always-on person detector. Of course, I’m building this on a BrightSign XT5 player (more on that later). But since a friend said he was using a Beelink SER9 with a AMD Ryzen AI NPU (~50 TOPS) I thought I’d check it out. Can it actually run the detector? Short answer, as of today: no — and the reason is not the part you’d expect.

Few policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and parents talk openly about corporal punishment in the 21st century. The phrase seems more appropriate to the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was liberally administered to children and youth in classrooms and principals’ offices. Paddling and spanking students (and other ways of physically punishing students) were common and legally permitted practices. In many states, it was the law, and in those states that banned the practice, legislators…

ANAKIN SKYWALKER Mail-Away or POTF2 Style The Vintage Collection 3 3/4-Inch basic figure Item No.: Asst. F6878 No. G2610 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: #405 Includes: Cloth robes Action Feature: Removable robes Retail: $19.99 Availability: August 2026 Appearances: Return of the Jedi Bio: On Endor, Anakin watched over Luke and his friends Yoda and Obi-Wan as they celebrated the galaxy’s new freedom . (Taken from the cardback.) Image: Adam's photo lab. Availability: Click here to buy it at eBay…