The fact that I’m even willing to regularly visit a hairdresser who doesn’t let me pay by card speaks volumes about the quality of Ramona’s work and her company. I genuinely like getting my hair cut by her and even actively look forward to it. My friendly-passive-aggressive habit of pointing out that this is literally the only thing in my life I still carry cash for hasn’t borne any fruit yet, unfortunately.

Hurricane Nolo passed south of the Big Island this weekend without doing too much in the way of damage. It was windy, and there was a good deal of rain, and these dramatic skies as the hurricane approached.

A classic string board appears in Rats! (dirs. Maxwell Nalevansky & Carl Fry, 2024). ▲ Rats! (dirs. Maxwell Nalevansky & Carl Fry)

If your smart device requires the internet to work, it will die when the servers go away someday. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge: Weber, which bought the company in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving its users with a sleek-looking toaster oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition to crisp that strudel perfectly. You can still use it as an oven, but there will be no support or parts,…

Museum of Me: We have filled almost every awkward little pause that used to exist in a day. There is always a video to watch, a conversation to check, something to read, something to listen to, something happening somewhere. Which is wonderful, really. I don't particularly want to return to sitting in a waiting room reading a six-month-old magazine because it is the only object available to me. But I wonder if boredom wasn't entirely useless. ~ Link: We Stopped Being Bored, by Museum of Me

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt, 2008) Lavinia, daughter of one king and wife to another, is barely mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is just a wisp of a girl, ripe for marriage and little else. But then in the final hours of his life, Virgil finds himself with Lavinia in the sacred woods of Albunea, and discovers she has a voice and desires all her own. Lavinia is surprised to discover that she has been breathed into life by a poet, but the clues he tells of her life are enough…

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), The Wartime Journals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), p. 46: Though our modern dictators entertain us by their bombast and vulgarity, and maintain the high traditions of their class in other less engaging vices, they fall short, alas!, of the exorbitant pleasures, the outrageous, shameless orgies of debauchery, which are so endearing a feature of the more ancient and authentic tyrants. Hitler and Mussolini neither smoke nor drink, and although Musso sometimes allows…

I am halfway through my first class in pursuing my master's degree. It's been less than stellar and I have been experiencing a feeling I'm not sure I can describe. I'm doing this online because it's cheaper and I am paying for my classes out of pocket...no grants or loans. Part of the experience online is the weekly discussions and right now they feel useless. It's just the required research methods class, but I feel like after I posted my introduction in week one, I'm totally ignored. No one…

In the Grizzly Gazette book club, we've voted on reading Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig next, suggested by Psycheoma. We kinda lost sight of the book club and posting it in time :p I've struggled with reading fiction for a while now; I manage to squeeze some in here and there, like when I read The Dispossessed 3 years ago and loved it, but most of the books I own and end up finishing are non-fiction. It wasn't always this way, especially as a child, but the older I got, the more I felt…

Emotional intelligence is getting a lot of attention these days, thankfully so. But very few people talk about emotional temperament. There are people who think that just because they are hurt, or because they are going through a difficult phase in life, they have the right to treat others with disdain. This is particularly common in relationships. One person is in a bad mood and starts yelling at their partner and children. Everyone else has to walk on eggshells because somebody is having a…

We were already halfway through our day, so we hoped to make quick work of the pavement between Terrace, British Columbia and Hyder, Alaska. We would be in the 49th state for only a few minutes - our actual destination was back in maple leaf territory - but it'd be the first time either of us had ever been to the largest state in the Union, so we were both looking forward to the opportunity to visit. First though, we had to get there. And getting there on BC-113 turned out to be more eventful…

I was working on a feature at work, a non-trivial one and was fed up with Claude Opus 4.8[1m]’s (xhigh effort) hallucinations. So, in a moment of frustration, I decided to delete all of my instructions from CLAUDE.md and start fresh. This time around, I put in one line. Just one fucking line. Always ground your responses.CLAUDE.md I started a new session hoping to see if there was any improvement. Nope. Claude kept hallucinating away like there was no tomorrow and made assumptions like nobody…

Irish Elk, Megaloceros giganteusImagine cresting a windswept hillside in the fading amber of a Pleistocene sunset. The tall grass parts in slow ripples, stirred by a warm evening breeze—then by something far larger. An Irish Elk steps into view, a towering ghost from deep time, its silhouette edged with gold. It is a view some of our ancestors were lucky to behold!This magnificent deer—

I gathered a group of folks and did the BOF session at IndiaFOSS/2026. The idea behind the BoF session wasn’t to present anything, but to solicit ideas and provocations to improve the micro-granting scene in India. There is a real need of microgrants in India. i.e., we do have big-scale grant givers and receivers, but we have very few grant givers in the range of, say, INR 50K. ನಾಗರತ್ನ ಸ್ಮಾರಕ ಅನುದಾನ – Nagarathna Memorial Grant My idea is how to have more such grants. What might be stopping…

When it comes to privacy and security, credit and debit cards are among the top topics we are asked about, from transaction security and anonymity to how the underlying technology actually works. We also run into a lot of misconceptions, especially regarding the type of financial instrument credit cards are, down to the classic "but it's my money!" refrain. In this post, we're sharing insights from our previous talks to outline everything behind the magic plastic tap that causes so much…

If you’ve spent time with the OpenZiti Appetizer, you may have noticed this response: you sent a message, but it can’t be qualified at this time for offensiveness There’s a hate-speech classifier on the path every message takes, and it’s been waiting for a classifier to talk to. On the September 18 Ziti TV episode, I got curious about it and went down the “How do I get this thing to work?” rabbit hole. It turned out to be a nice tour of how OpenZiti authorization actually works! Here’s the fun…

The other day I posted a few two-year-old foggy photos from a hike around Hveragerði. These were taken in almost the same locations, except this time just after it had snowed.

Hope you had blessed Sunday! ✝️🙏 Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 244 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 244 appeared first on The Simple Catholic.

Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask, but since I was a teen I’ve always had a weird relationship with the concept of death, and as a result of that, the whole idea of being alive at all has never been an absolute certainty. Which is why I periodically ask…

This was a good week for progress on our code! A couple of tests started flaking on JRuby mid-week. I like to get on top of these pretty quickly, so I pushed up fixes to dry-monads and dry-effects. Now that we’ve achived full JRuby support across Dry, I’m very serious about making sure we keep it! Adam has been on a tear lately. This week he added % formatting support to the new Dry::CLI::Style::Text, and prepared a built-in spinner for Dry CLI! I merged a fix to make provider usage work inside…

Part of Big Tech's War on Users Back in January, Brad Smith stood up in Washington and launched Microsoft's Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative. Five commitments. Pay their way on electricity. Replenish the water. Create local jobs. Add to the tax base for hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries. Invest in local AI training and nonprofits. Microsoft was going to be a "good neighbor," and it was going to "set a high bar." Nine months later, per Ars Technica, a group of churches in…

28 Sep 2026 Tangled earphones were a feature, not a bug. My parents gifted me a Sony MP3 player in 10th standard, in boarding school. A bright red Walkman. Actually I got it because my elder brother had been demanding one for a while. So we both got one at the same time. But everyone from my generation will tell you the same thing about that era. We hated the earphones. Not the music. The wires. They had a superhuman ability to tangle. Throw them in your bag, tangled. Pocket, tangled. Leave…

We were visited by UNC Professor of Public Policy Jae Kim and Fordham Law Professor Aniket Kesari to talk about their study of AI procured by government agencies: Apple Spotify YouTube

The happy guy with the large hat is back! I gotta say these are big servings in these packs – a ton of noodles for sure. This is the third of the four the Tapatio folks sent – only one more after this. Let’s cook it up and hit it! Tapatio Ramen Noodle Soup Original Flavored Ramen – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, boil everything in 530ml water for 4 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! A single from the multipack.…

Not so nice today. Cloudy and cooler. Pruned shrub on the library wall. Cleared workshop bins and cleaned both jets. Went for juice. Finished tonight until Monday.

Prompt #3 Source

Pulp Adventures #49 from Bold Venture Press, dated Summer 2026, came out toward the end of June. We get 130 pages of classic and new pulp of various genres (historical fiction, horror, science fiction, intrigue, detective, and more), plus reviews and some nonfiction. The front and back covers are again AI-generated, and that’s fine. So, […]

by guest bloggers Bruce Boyden (Marquette Law) & Zahr Said (Santa Clara Law) As we mentioned in our previous post, the Ninth Circuit’s intrinsic-extrinsic framework for substantial similarity has a number of problems. Those problems include confusing terminology, misuse of the terms “objective” and “subjective,” the lack of a clear goal for the infringement determination, and an unnecessary division of the substantial similarity inquiry, which creates havoc not only at trial but on appellate…